By capping or freezing universal service subsidies to rural carri...

or capping rural subsidies would stabilize the high-cost program enough to do a more “granular” study of rural telecom costs, the company told the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service. Some areas of the country with very high costs don’t get Universal Service Fund (USF) support due to the way costs are measured, Embarq told the joint board, which is close to recommending measures, including a temporary cap, to halt USF growth. “The ability to accurately identify high-cost areas at a very granular level has reached a level of precision that was unimaginable only a few years ago,” Embarq said: “Advances in modeling, better data and ever-increasing computing power” give the Commission “a set of tools capable of producing a study to ensure that all high-cost areas that truly require explicit support are adequately supported,” Embarq said. The FCC should freeze or cap the fund while it works on “stabilizing” the USF, it said: “All things being equal, a temporary freeze would be preferable to a cap… since it ensures that no individual recipient would be made any worse off.” A cap could allow “the possibility of individual winners and losers underneath the cap,” Embarq said.