NTCA Complains of Funding 'Disconnect' Between Lifeline and High-Cost USF Programs
NTCA said a funding "disconnect between the Lifeline and high-cost USF programs" left rural consumers "stuck in the 'digital divide.'" Budget constraints and other structural issues limit rural carriers' ability to make 15/2 Mbps broadband available to "large swaths of…
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their service areas," said the RLEC group in a Friday filing in docket 10-90. The FCC provided an "inflation-based update" to the Lifeline low-income subsidy program, but "there is no realistic Lifeline discount large enough to enable a rural low-income consumer to obtain standalone broadband when the 'starting price' for all of the rural consumers in a given area is already far in excess of what is available in urban areas," NTCA said. While the FCC "took steps to remake the Lifeline program for the broadband era and also updated the High-Cost mechanism in recent years, the artificially constrained and arbitrary High-Cost budget is undermining the goals of both the High-Cost and Lifeline programs ... to the detriment" of rural users, the group said. It urged the agency "to reconsider the sufficiency of a budget for the existing High Cost program that is based upon arbitrarily time-locked support levels now more than six years old."