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.