4 months ago in Local Jerry Oster Photo: WNAX
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem asked legislators to support using up to one hundred million dollars for broadband expansion across the state.
Some companies already have expansion plans underway.
Valley Telecommunications, based in Herried, is working on a fiber optic expansion plan in Brookings, Moody and Kingsbury Counties.
Valley Tel Manager Jeff Symens says they are working through the federal R-DOF, or “Rural Digital Opportunity Fund” to help pay for the expansion…
Symens says the funding is through an open auction…
Symens says the federal funding will help fill a big gap for them…
Editor’s Note:
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. For more stories from Mountain State Spotlight, visit www.mountainstatespotlight.org.
West Virginiaâs biggest telecommunications company will get hundreds of millions more in federal money to serve the state, despite being under investigation for its chronic poor service and misuse of funds by the stateâs utility regulator.
Itâs the result of an auction in which the Federal Communications Commission gave away $9 billion of its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is financed by surcharges on customers telephone bills. Of the $362 million allocated to West Virginia by the FCC, over two-thirds will go to Frontier Communications and will be distributed in annual installments over the next decade.
Mon, Dec 14th 2020 6:24am
Karl Bode
The FCC last week held a reverse auction to dole out $9 billion to, purportedly, improve patchy U.S. broadband. But consumer groups say the auction did nothing of the sort, instead delivering $9 billion to a dodgy roster of companies with existing histories of fraud that will be using much of the funds to expand broadband to affluent areas where broadband is often already available.
The reverse auction involved doling out billions from the FCC s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), paid into via Universal Service Fund (USF) contributions affixed to your broadband and phone bills. To be very clear:
The change is related to the Federal Communications Commissionâs auction for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.
Successful bidders in Pennsylvania will receive $368.7 million over the next 10 years to bring high-speed internet service to homes and businesses that are underserved or do not have access to broadband that meets current federal standards.
The FCC indicates more than 99% of the successful bids are for 100 Megabit-per-second download speeds, four times faster than the âNetflix speedâ benchmark of 25 Megabits per second currently used by the FCC to define access to broadband service
The state Public Utility Commission noted successful funding for these projects is the result of work by many stakeholders who supported it, including the office of Gov. Tom Wolf, legislators and Penn State Universityâs Rural Extension Program, who developed a detailed and publicly available map that showed all the eligible areas and the support that could be provided to i
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