Western Telecommunications Alliance

On June 22, the FCC, in consultation with RUS, released Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Update to Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy.

The 2008 Farm Bill required the FCC to submit to Congress a report describing a “comprehensive rural broadband strategy.”  This report was completed in 2009.  The report released yesterday is an update of that report.  The report focuses on actions at the FCC, RUS and NTIA “to meet the demand for affordable, high quality broadband services in rural communities, including historic investments made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”  The report finds that “While significant progress has been made to increase rural broadband deployment and adoption since the publication of the 2009 Rural Broadband Report, and a number of private- and public-sector initiatives are underway, additional efforts and new policies—including major universal service policy reform—are still required to ensure that rural America fully shares in the benefits of the emerging broadband economy.”

The Oklahoma Telephone Association put together a short summary document to assist its membership with alerting their communities to the recent spate of call termination problems.  OTA wanted to make it available for other rural telcos in other states.  Feel free to use it and edit it for your purposes.

OPASTCO, WTA, NTCA, ITTA and RICA submitted comments in response to the FCC’s Notice of Inquiry into the “Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming”.

Today, The Hill, published an op-ed written by former Senator Byron Dorgan (ND) on the subject of USF reform and the potential hazards of the FCC’s current proposal.