How to get a grant from the NTIA and RUS Part 1

How to Get a Grant From the NTIA and RUS: Part 1

Broadband Workshops

The NOFA is officially out, and the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) are hosting a series of public broadband grant workshops to guide us. This is our opportunity to find out about the application process for $4 billion in broadband grants and loans under the Recovery Act.

July 17, 2009
Billings, MT
Holiday Inn Grand Montana
5500 Midland Rd
Billings, MT 59101
888-465-4329

July 21, 2009
Minneapolis, MN
Crowne Plaza St. Paul - Riverfront
11 East Kellogg Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55101
800-593-5708

July 23, 2009
Albuquerque, NM
Marriott Albuquerque Pyramid North
5151 San Francisco Road NE
Albuquerque, NM 87109
800-262-2043

July 24, 2009
Los Angeles, CA
Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza
251 S. Olive St
Los Angeles, CA 90012
888-444-6664

The deadline for the first grant round is coming up soon - August 14th, 2009.

You can register for any of the workshops online here.

If you can't make they have also posted their workshop presentations here, as well as the grant applications.

I will be attending the workshop in Billings this week and will update this site with any new information they announce.

Videos from BTOP Public Hearings

NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) Public Hearings

Some videos have a delay of a few minutes before the hearing begins. If you don't hear anything immediately after clicking the start button, just wait a few minutes.

BTW, in my testimony in the first video from the March 17th hearing I made a statement about defining broadband as 1.5 Mbps full-duplex, sustained. I have since changed my mind. I now think broadband should be defined as anything 100 Mpbs or more, and any speeds less than that should be defined as baseband along the lines of what the IEEE has already established (see "Terminology" post below).

March 10, 2009 - U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC
BTOP Overview



March 16, 2009 - U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC
Topics: Private Sector Eligibility; Coordination between NTIA and RUS on Broadband Initiatives; Innovative Programs to Encourage Sustainable Adoption of Broadband Service and Expanding Public Computer Center Capacity









March 17, 2009 - Charleston Heights Center, Las Vegas, NV
Topics: Reaching Vulnerable Populations; Driving Demand and the Role of Strategic Institutions; Definitions of Broadband,Underserved







Videos from the other hearings were not available.

Assessing your Needs

When planning your broadband networks you need to assess your needs. A very broad overview of things you will want to consider are:

Transport:
The bandwidth feed to deliver broadband on and off the reservation. What is available or will be used to deliver broadband to your community? Examples are:
Wired: Fiber, Coax, Copper
Wireless: Microwave, Satellite

Distribution:
Once broadband is delivered to the reservation, how will bandwidth be distributed around the reservation?
Wi-fi, DSL, cable, etc

Access:
How will your customers attach to the network?
Modem, antennae, set top box, etc

Content:
The reason for building the network. While it is not necessary to develop your own content to build a broadband network, it is important to realize that without culturally and locally relevant content the system may not be anything more than a bunch of meaningless equipment and wires in the eyes of your customers.

When developing systems to spur economic development, it's also important to realize that true economic development can't happen if we only focus on capitalizing infrastructure and equipment while ignoring our human spirit.

Technology has been proven to be a great tool for stimulating the most creative of minds. With applications such as Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Blogger.com, and countless other sites the lines of what we define as community are blurring. We are no longer confined to geographic locations. We are no longer satisfied in being passive recipients of news and information. Rather, more of us are taking active roles and participating in developing our own content.

For many, broadband has provided a means of claiming our own humble place at the corporate table of technology to share news, information, and transfer our knowledge to others in the global community. For my own tribe, it has become a way of using technology's greatest strengths to preserve our greatest truths in our history, language, and culture.

Terminology

Bandwidth: Measure of capacity in "the pipe". Digital Bandwidth is measured in bits per second (bps).

Units: Kilo (k), Mega (M), Giga (G), and Tera (T) represents thousand, million, billion, trillion. Pecta (P) is quadrillion.

Bit: The smallest unit of digital transmission, a single state, often expressed as On or Off or also a "one" or "zero". A million bits per second is Mbps.

Byte: Consists of 8 bits and can convey 256 separate characters A million bytes per second is MBps.

Broadband: Data transmission scheme that sends multiple pieces of data over a single medium. Often refers to high-speed data transfer speeds when benchmarked with dial-up. The FCC currently defines broadband speeds to be upstream/downstream data flow of a MINIMUM OF 768 kbps, which doesn't even meet the IEEE definition for baseband speeds. The FCC is currently seeking input for a new definition.

10-base-T: Baseband (or narrow band) Ethernet capable of transmitting 10 million bits per second over a network.

100 base-T: Broadband Ethernet capable of transmitting 100 million bits per second over a network.

802.11: An IEEE standard for wireless data transmission at 2.4 Mhz

BPL: Broadband over Power Line, an emerging technology that utilizes existing medium voltage to transport data at broadband speeds.

Cat 5: Four pair of twisted telephone wires capable of up to 100 million bits (100Mbps) data transmission for up to 100 meters (inside wiring)

Cable Modem: A new popular high-speed (2 Mbps or less) that utilizes two-way cable TV systems. Most installed cable TV systems in the past two decades were one-way.

CPE: Customer Premise Equipment, the “box” or device that is the interface with the customer to the broadband utility.

Dark Fiber: A fiber optic cable that is installed but does not have the lasers installed to "light" the fiber. It is either spare or leased to entities that intend to install the electronics.

DSL: Digital Subscriber Line , A telecommunications provider high-speed (128 kbps or more) offering that is popular in urban areas for users within three miles of a provider’s central office.

Ethernet: Defined by IEEE, a packet based data transmission protocol that defines how data is transmitted then retrieved on a network.

Fiber Optics: A strand of glass thinner than a human hair that is capable of carrying a light signal close to 70 miles without amplification. The light can be pulsed in a single wavelength to represent 45 Gigabits of information. Adding a wavelength doubles that capacity. In the year 2000, the wavelength technology is at 16 and growing.

High-speed: Synonymous to Broadband for quantifying the amount of data

IEEE: Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers a standards making body comprised of industry professionals.

ISP: Internet Service Provider. A network service provider that supplies a path to the World Wide Web without controlling the content.

T-1: Bell system introduced the T carrier system, which digitized voice into 24 channels, in the 1960s. This system allowed 4 wires to carry the information of 48 wires. The bandwidth of T-1 is defined at 1.544 Mbps. A voice channel was 64 Kbps.

Digital Divide: A common euphemism that describes the haves and have nots of the information age, usually urban versus rural communities.

Broadband Initiative Kick Off

"President Obama has made expanded access to broadband services a priority in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Commerce, Agriculture, and the FCC will work together closely to implement the act's broadband initiatives and to develop a national broadband plan."

-Anna Gomez, Acting Administrator for the National Telecommunications Information Administration

In case you missed it, there was a joint broadband meeting at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC on March 10, 2009. The broadband initiative is part of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is an important opportunity for tribes to apply for grants to build out their broadband infrastructure.

To kick off the intiative, they brought in the big brass, which included speeches from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack; Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Michael Copps; and U.S. Dept. of Commerce Senior Advisor and Acting Chief of Staff Rick Wade.

The meeting notes are 70 pages long and can be accessed from the NTIA website at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants/090310/transcript_090310.pdf. Before you read them, I suggest putting on a pot of coffee and turning off the phone.

Or, if you just want to know "where's the beef?" as Commissioner Copps put it, then here are some of the highlights from the meeting notes.

There are five straightforward goals for the administration's broadband stimulus funding.

- Begin to close the broadband gap across America. Extend high capacity pipes closer to users in rural, remote, and underserved communities. Companies will be able to connect to those pipes which will spur competition and get services to people and businesses.

- Stimulate investment by requiring companies that take federal money to invest their own funds as well.

- Create jobs.

- Start taking steps toward ensuring that community anchor institutions have high-speed access: schools, universities, libraries, community centers, job training centers, and hospitals.

- Encourage demand for broadband. When more people understand how broadband access can help them find new ways of making a living, that they'll want to have it for themselves.

In a nutshell, there will be over $7 billion available in broadband funds from both NTIA & USDA / RUS.

USDA - $2+ Billion in grants and loans

Seventy-five percent of the area to be served by the project has to be in a rural area without sufficient access to high-speed broadband service to facilitate rural economic development.

One of the goals of the Act is to create jobs.

They will give priority to projects that will give end users a choice of more than one service provider.

They will help the areas that have the highest proportion of rural residents that do not have access to broadband service.


The first NOFA should be published within the next 60 to 90 days. Subsequent NOFAs will be published thereafter.

There will be at least three NOFAs.

They will be working very closely with NTIA and the FCC on the timing of the subsequent ones.

Each NOFA will be approximately three to four months each time.

The NOFAs will have the amount of funds available and the applicant, the area, and the project eligibility requirements.

They will explain the whole application process, and the time frames that applicants would need to submit those applications.

They will lay out all the scoring criteria and the evaluation criteria, and the reporting requirements that the applicants have to abide by to receive these grants.

NTIA - $4.7 Billion in grants

Eligibility: To be eligible for a grant, you need to be a state or a political subdivision or territory. Indian tribes and native Hawaiian organizations are also eligible, as are nonprofit foundations, corporations, institutions or associations.

New for the Commerce Department is that broadband service providers and infrastructure providers may be eligible if we determine it to be in the public
interest.

Their plan is to have four different programs:

- Broadband mapping & planning = $350 million
- Public computer center capacity grants = $200 million
- Innovative programs to encourage sustainable broadband adoption and large broadband deployment and expansion = $250 million

There will be three grant rounds.

The first NOFA will be out somewhere in the April to 4 June period this year.
Second round, from October to December of this year.
Third round around April or June in 2010.

These are all going to be competitive grants based on published selection and evaluation criteria, and the grant application will have to of course provide a detailed description of how you're going to spend the money, and a detailed budget. The law requires that you demonstrate that this project would not have been implemented in the time period without federal assistance.

You'll have to disclose other federal or state funding that you've either applied for or that you already have, and it's okay to apply to both programs.

They have to award, according to the law, at least one grant per state. Each application will be considered in terms of will it increase broadband affordability and subscribership, will it provide the greatest broadband speed to the most users? Will it enhance service for health care, education or children? And whether or not the applicant is a socially and economically disadvantaged small business.

NTIA will award all the grants by September 30th of 2010.

As you can see, this is going to happen very fast. The key is to have your plans ready so you can start applying with the first NOFA that comes out, which could be as soon as next month.