On July 24, the FCC authorized a new subsidy program, Enhanced A-CAM (Alternate Connect America Cost Model). This program will extend subsidies to small, regulated telephone companies at a cost of about $1.27 billion per year for ten years. The subsidy will be paid from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund.
The funding requires recipients to deploy voice plus broadband with speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps to 100% of the areas covered by the subsidy within four years. The order is technology neutral, so telcos could elect to meet this requirement with fiber or with licensed fixed wireless technology.
According to Mike Conlow, this order will bring broadband to almost 583,000 unserved or underserved locations that are already covered by the NTIA’s BEAD grant footprint. Today’s blog talks about the absurdity of the FCC making this announcement only weeks after the NTIA announced the distribution of the $42.5 billion in BEAD funds to states. This means that two U.S. agencies both announced funding to cover the identical half-million locations within a month of each other.
Think about what this means. A state that has some of these A-CAM locations was allocated BEAD grant money to bring broadband to these areas. The FCC order is then directly funding to build broadband to the same passings. This means that a state that has a lot of unserved and underserved A-CAM passings is getting a funding windfall. Conlow estimated that this double funding is bringing a funding windfall of $180 million to Nebraska – the state with the most unserved and underserved A-CAM locations. The downside of this is that if Nebraska and other states are getting a windfall from the FCC decision, then other states are receiving less BEAD funding than they would have if these locations had been excluded from BEAD before the NTIA allocated the $42.5 billion.
The FCC’s A-CAM order was released only three weeks after the NTIA announced the BEAD allocations to states. There is no way that the FCC didn’t do this deliberately. The FCC could have asked the NTIA to take these locations out of the BEAD process so that the $42.5 billion would have been allocated fairly.
Two years ago, the Biden administration directed the FCC, the NTIA, and the USDA to coordinate everything associated with federal funding for broadband. The FCC’s actions with this decision are the exact opposite of coordination.
I speculate that the FCC did this to reclaim relevance in the discussion of who is helping America solve the rural broadband gap. The FCC has taken a lot of criticism in recent years for botching the RDOF funding process and handing out wasted billions to the big telcos in the CAF II subsidies. The FCC was also largely cut out of the biggest effort ever with BEAD grants to solve the rural broadband gap, and that had to sting. The FCC can now say to the folks living in the A-CAM areas that it provided the funding to bring better broadband instead of the NTIA. I’m picturing FCC ribbon cuttings for projects that launch fiber in these areas. I can’t think of any other reason that this order would have been released so soon after the NTIA announcements of BEAD funding for each state.
The NTIA should react to this announcement by reallocating the BEAD funding to states because for every state that got a windfall like Nebraska from the FCC’s A-CAM order, other states received less BEAD funding. Unfortunately, reopening the allocation process could open a can of worms, so that likely won’t happen.
In my mind, the FCC has become a loose cannon due to its control of the Universal Service Fund. The USF for all practical purposes is a big slush fund that gives the FCC the ability to tackle anything it wants, outside of any control by Congress or the White House. After this announcement, it wouldn’t shock me to see the FCC announce another round of RDOF funding in the middle of the BEAD grant process next year.