Tag Archives: grants

The Grant Drop Dilemma

As I’ve been working with clients on grant applications, I keep running across issues that anybody filing for grant funds should consider when seeking a grant. I recently realized that the short time frame for many state grants is out of synch with the reality of the way that ISPs can add customers to a network.

Grants generally pay only for the capital cost of assets. The largest cost for fiber grants is likely the cost of the fiber running up and down streets to pass customers. The second largest cost in many grants is the fiber drops that connect from the street to customers.

I’m seeing many state grant awards with a 2-year construction deadline starting from the date of a grant award, meaning the grants won’t pay for any assets that are completed after the mandatory ending date. Even for a small grant project of a few million dollars, there is a lot to do in the 2-year time frame. The project must be engineered, and construction material ordered. With today’s supply chain issues, there could be a delay of as long as a year to receive all needed construction materials. The network must then be constructed. Hut sites must be created, with concrete pads poured. And only after the fiber has been built and the electronics activated can an ISP begin activating customers.

A grant application requires an ISP to set a target customer penetration rate. If an ISP sets a target rate of 60%, then the grant includes an award for drops, customer electronics, and installation costs for that many customers – no more. If a grant applicant gets more than the 60% penetration rate, the cost of installing the extra customers comes out of the ISP’s pocket. That may not seem like a big deal, but rural places with long drops can be expensive.

The bigger issue with a 2-year grant is not finishing the installations on time. Experienced ISPs know that it can take 4 or 5 years to fully penetrate a new market. There are always customers ready to be connected when the grant is first announced. These customers take no selling other than announcing a sign-up process.

But other potential customers are not so gung ho. They might wait to see how their neighbors like the service before committing to a new ISP. People in rural areas are often particularly suspicious of claims made by a new ISP because they’ve been burned in the past. They might have been told that a CAF II grant was going to make DSL better – and it didn’t. They might have been given a sales pitch by a wireless ISP promising better broadband and then delivering speeds no better than the DSL. And many have been lured to try satellite broadband and found that it was expensive and wouldn’t do what they needed.

But even the cautious and suspicious potential customers will be won over in time – but the big question with grant funding is if an ISP can get them installed before the ending date of the grant. It’s not going to be an easy thing to do, and I recommend that ISPs start the sales pitch as soon as the grant award is announced. In most rural markets, ISPs know they will eventually get 75% or 80% of the customers, but not within two years of the day they start the engineering.

I’ve seen ISPs that try to avoid this problem by asking for funding to install 100% of drops. That would allow building drops to everybody, including households that will never take service. A smart grant reviewer will disallow this and will not waste valuable grant funding building homes that may never buy broadband.

In summary, an ISP has two concerns with a grant with a short timeframe. Make sure to ask for enough money upfront. If you only ask for enough money to install 50% of customers and then exceed that, then you won’t get extra grant money to cover them. But on the flip side, an ISP must realize that there is often going to be a good chance of not meeting the target penetration rate in a short-term grant. Even if you eventually get 75% households in a grant area, the grant will only reimburse you for customers who were installed before the last day covered by the grant period. For short grants of two years, that means starting the sales process early and diligently to get customers sold and installed before the funding clock runs out.

ReConnect Grants – Not for Everybody

Yesterday’s blog listed the major rules for eligibility for this year’s ReConnect grant. Today’s blog is going to point out important aspects of the programs that you should be aware of before deciding to apply.

Grant Application is a Bear. These grants require far more effort than any other broadband grant program. The required paperwork for filing is more like a formal loan application than a simple grant application. You cannot casually file for these grants, and if you omit documentation, you will likely quickly fall out of consideration.

Probably Large Awards. Past experience with this program would suggest that the RUS tends to make a small number of larger grants rather than a large number of smaller grants.

Awards Will Likely Include RUS Loans. Awards can be made as 100% grants, 50% grants/50% loans, or 100% loans. Applicants should be aware that 100% grants will be exceedingly difficult to win, so grant applicants should be prepared to accept an RUS loan. While RUS loans are at a good interest rate, many applicants cannot accept RUS loans. RUS loans will likely require a full asset pledge from a borrower, which is often impossible if you have other non-RUS debt. While these grants favor local governments, many local governments are unable to accept RUS loans because they can’t meet the pledge requirements. Standalone entities like government-owned utilities have a better chance. The loans are also made on the same basis as any bank loan, and an applicant must have a solid and solvent balance sheet and financial history.

Grant Scoring Will Eliminate Most Projects. Most potential applicants aren’t going to get out of the gate due to not scoring high on the grant rating scale. An applicant that fails in even a few scoring categories will likely not be considered. Study this scoring list carefully and be honest about your eligibility:

  • Rurality. 25 Points. Grant areas must be at specified distances from existing towns.
  • 25/3 Mbps. 25 Points. The grant allows serving areas that have existing speeds greater than 25/3 Mbps, but you are penalized in this scoring for serving underserved locations.
  • Poverty. 20 points. Points awarded based upon the level of poverty in the grant area as measured by the U.S. Census Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program.
  • Affordability. 20 points. Retail broadband rates must be affordable compared to existing area rates. Participants must offer a low-income product and be willing and able to participate in both the FCC Lifeline and Congress’s EBB programs. Note that an ISP must become an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) to participate in Lifeline – not everybody is able or willing to do that.
  • Labor Standards. 20 Points. While the grants don’t require paying Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, there is a hefty scoring penalty for not doing so.
  • Tribal Lands. (15 points). Tribal entities or projects that are at least 50% on Tribal land will get the 15 points.
  • Non-Profit Entities. (15 points) Governments, non-profits, and cooperatives get extra scoring points. For public-private partnerships to get these points, the applicant must be one of these entities and be willing to own the assets and take on any RUS loans. You can’t partner with a city in name only.
  • Socially Vulnerable Community. (15 points) 75% of the proposed service area must meet the RUS’s definition of Socially Vulnerable Communities. This is related to poverty but favors communities that are economically stressed for reasons other than poverty.
  • Net Neutrality. (10 points) To get these points the applicant must pledge to accept the definition of net neutrality that the FCC scrapped in 2017.
  • Wholesale Services. (10 points). This is awarded to grant recipients willing to sell wholesale access to the network to other ISPs. This is generally described as open access.

That’s 175 total points to determine the most eligible projects. If you are not a tribe, aren’t partnered with a non-profit entity, or aren’t willing to offer open-access you’d already be 40 points down on the scale. If your project is too close to an existing city or town or includes some homes that have speeds greater than 25/3 Mbps, you could be down 50 more points. If you want to serve farmers instead of poor communities, you could be down 35 more points. These grants are definitely not for everybody. I recommend a realistic assessment of your likely score before you do any work towards chasing this grant. As is usual with federal grants, there will be desperate communities that will spend the time and money to pursue this grant with no chance of winning.

Require Extra Effort. These grants will also require an environmental and historic preservation review.

Gotchas in the e-Connectivity Grant Program

The high-level rules came out on Thursday for the USDA e-Connectivity grants being administered by the RUS. This is $560 million of grants and loans that were authorized by Congress last spring – this was first announced as a $600 million program and I’m not sure where the other $40 million went. I’m not going to list all of the rules of the grants – I’ve seen a dozen websites already that have summarized the key grant requirements. Instead I’m going to talk about a few requirements that I think will be show stoppers for many potential applicants.

RUS Loans are Still Draconian. Only 1/3 of the funding will be outright grants, with the other 2/3 being outright loans or 50/50 loans and grants. This means that most of funding can only go to those who are already RUS borrowers or who are willing and able to accept the draconian RUS loan provisions.

Anybody accepting an RUS loan must pledge 100% of their existing assets to the RUS and also give the RUS an exclusive first lien position on the company. What this means is that anybody that already has a loan elsewhere is not going to be able to take these loans. Existing lenders like CFC. CoBank, or any commercial bank will not accept a second loan position to these new awards. A huge number of telcos and electric cooperatives that borrow elsewhere won’t be able to accept RUS loans, eliminating them from consideration for anything but the 100% grant portion of the program.

These same loan restrictions also make it unlikely that any government entity can accept an award that includes am RUS loan. I’ve worked with nearly a dozen government entities that have pursued RUS loans and none of them have successfully been able to overcome the pledge and other lending hurdles.

The 10% Test. The program has a gotcha slipped in by Congress that no more than 10% of the locations covered by the program can already have existing broadband 10/1 Mbps or greater speeds. This is a giant change from past RUS award programs that allowed up to 85% to have 10/1 speeds. Applicants need to take this requirement seriously and I expect any applications that can’t the lack of existing broadband will be quickly tossed out of consideration. This is not a flexible rule and was inserted into the grant rules by big telco lobbyists who don’t want to see any competition.

This means that any parts of the country previously covered by any federal funding program that required 10/1 Mbps speeds will not be eligible – including past award areas that haven’t yet been upgraded, like the areas recently awarded under the CAF II reverse auction. Applicants are going to have to be extremely careful in defining study areas, almost on a home by home basis. I fully expect RUS to test the study areas hard and I’m positive that outside parties (like incumbent telcos) will be able to intervene if they think an applicant fails this test.

The worst part of this is that we know that the rural broadband maps suck and that there are many places that the FCC considers to have 10/1 broadband that doesn’t have it. Applicants will have a big uphill battle to get funding in these areas.

Requires Two Years of Sound Audits. Applicants need to produce two years of audited solid historical financial performance – meaning start-ups need not bother with the grants. The RUS hasn’t forgotten the big problems they had with start-up companies during the stimulus grant program.

Environmental Impacts. Applicants must analyze the environmental and national historic preservation impacts of a grant request. It’s possible to get out of this requirement if a state official will declare that these tests aren’t required for applicants from their state. Applicants are also going to need affidavits from a state official to describe state broadband grant programs and to describe any conflicts with a grant filing.

Record Keeping. In order to meet the 10% rule I expect study areas to be disjointed –pocket of homes here and there scattered over a larger area. Applicants will somehow have to track costs of construction in these small pockets and not mingle costs with other nearby areas that were not included in a grant supplication. It’s going to be hard to show an audit trail of invoices that are just for the study area.

Prevailing Wage. The announcement doesn’t mention prevailing wage, but I expect this to apply. In past RUS grants this requirement has been included in the detailed descriptions of the grant process that hasn’t yet been released. Prevailing wage means paying construction labor at rates determine by each state, and which in many states reflect the cost of building in the largest cities and not in the rural areas. Prevailing wages can sometimes be so much higher than actual construction company rates that the difference in the wages can wipe out most of the benefit if getting a 50% grant.

Matching Funds Spent First. The grants require that matching funds must be 100% spent before any RUS money. That means the funding sources that incur the highest interest rates must be spent first, adding to the cost of the project. The source of the matching funds needs to be identified by the time of the grant filings.

I’m positive that many will be excited about a new large broadband grant program, but the above grant requirements are going to scare off or disqualify many potential applicants. These hurdles are not by accident – the big telcos really don’t want anybody competing against them and have stacked the deck with the nuances of the rules.

Progress on Federal Infrastructure Funding?

I’ve been continuing to follow the federal plans to launch a massive $1 trillion program to rebuild infrastructure, with an eye on possible funding for broadband.

The latest White House proposal includes $25 billion for broadband, spread over ten years. That’s obviously not enough to solve our broadband problem everywhere, but it certainly could put a big dent in it.

The first thing needed to understand the issue is a good estimate of the size of needed investment to build fiber. Back in 2013 an article in Forbes estimated the cost to build fiber everywhere at $140 billion, with the cost to get to most populated areas at half that. Just recently I saw a few news articles citing an estimated cost of $85 billion to bring ‘broadband’ to rural America. But I can’t track down who’s making that estimate or if ‘broadband’ means fiber everywhere or some mix of broadband technologies. But it’s obvious that the cost is going to be greater than $25 billion.

But there is another aspect of the White House proposal that we need to keep an eye on. They envision the government kicking in $200 billion with the rest of the $1 trillion coming from the private sector. Even if the entire $200 billion is in the form of outright grants, that means that a project funded under the federal plan would be getting a 20% grant and would have to somehow finance the other 80% of a project.

I’ve created a lot of rural business plans over the past few years and I can tell that a 20% grant is not going to work in financing rural fiber. That amount of grant might be sufficient when talking about rural county seats and other pockets of somewhat dense population. But all of the studies I’ve done show that it will require grants of 40% to 80% to finance building in rural America.

I also worry that part of the federal funding might also include loans, like was done a few years ago with the Stimulus broadband awards. Some of those projects got a mix of outright grants as well as long-term loans from the RUS. If the federal contribution is not all grants then its usefulness in rural America will be even more diminished.

This is not to say that the federal program might not offer different levels of grants and not stick to the overall 20% for everything. But if 20% grants are all that is offered there are not going to be many takers. A grant of that magnitude probably might bring fiber to suburbs and mid-sized towns, but not to rural America.

If the grants were set to 50% of the cost of a project it would stimulate a lot of rural fiber construction. We’ve seen this in action in programs like the DEED grants in Minnesota that have been funding $20M to $30M per year in the form of matching grants. In that state the various LECs, from the smallest up through CenturyLink, are using grant money to bring broadband to unserved rural customers. But Minnesota is unusual and is one of a handful of states where there are numerous telcos willing to branch out to serve the areas around them if these kinds of grants are available.

One of the biggest hurdles I see for building rural broadband is the availability of private capital. Even with a 50% grant the operators of these new networks will need to finance the other 50% of the projects. There is certainly cash available for this and having a federal infrastructure program might attract more lenders. But there is a natural lending limit on all telcos, big and small.

A large percentage of the smaller telcos I know have already been borrowing money to build fiber within their own operating areas, and those companies are not going to be able to borrow much more money even if it is available. Even the big companies have constraints. CenturyLink currently has an annual capital budget of about $3 billion per year and that is largely going towards building fiber in their urban markets. It’s hard to see them taking any real interest in building rural fiber if they have to borrow to do so. Many of the mid-sized telcos like Frontier and Windstream are already heavily leveraged and would have a hard time borrowing much. And Verizon and AT&T have made it very clear that they no longer want to be in the rural wire business. I’m not sure those companies would take on these networks if the federal government paid for all of it.

So having a federal broadband infrastructure program sounds great. But when you look a little closer at how it might work it starts to look troublesome. There are certainly a number of companies that would step up to build rural broadband if the grants are large enough to make the numbers work. But I’m not sure that there is any combination of companies that are able or willing to tackle all of the areas without broadband. It could end up being a program where there is more funding than takers.