USCellular CEO John Rooney urged the FCC to provide more USF mone...
USCellular CEO John Rooney urged the FCC to provide more USF money to wireless carriers in rural America. Rooney filed a letter with the FCC following a meeting with Comr. Tate at the CTIA conference in Orlando. “Urban consumers…
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have numerous choices in services and service providers today, and will continue to have such choices into the future,” Rooney wrote: “That is not the case in our nation’s rural areas. Many small towns are left out of the wireless revolution because no company’s business plan supports the construction of the networks needed to enable consumers to use a mobile phone everywhere they live and work.” Networks won’t get built without support, he said: “You can be certain that if it were profitable to do so, it would have happened in the nearly 20 years since the Commission first issued cellular licenses in rural America.” Rooney also urged the FCC to grant its ETC applications in N.C., Va., and N.H., saying consumers in those states “have been waiting nearly three years for us to accelerate our network construction and deliver new services.”