Rural Wireless Association Urges Mobility Fund Reforms
The FCC should address issues that arose during the first phase of the USF mobility fund before launching phase II, the Rural Wireless Association said in a letter to the commission. “There is a continued need to support mobile communications…
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services in rural areas,” RWA said. “Mobile voice and broadband services are critical to public safety communications and economic development, and can help address problems such as the ‘digital divide’ and ‘homework gap’ that are present in rural America. For these reasons, it is critical that the Commission craft and implement a dedicated mobility support mechanism that will provide specific, predictable, and sufficient support to both advance and sustain the availability of mobile services in high-cost areas.” The FCC should start by looking at Mobility Fund Phase I and “carefully consider what did and did not work,” RWA said. The record shows that only $67 million in Mobility Fund Phase I (MFI) funding has been disbursed, and more than $70 million was returned to the FCC, the group said. “RWA recommends that the Commission staff solicit feedback on MFI before diving headfirst into a Phase II mechanism that risks replicating unpredictable processes,” the letter said. RWA also said FCC data on broadband deployment needs to be improved. The group called on the FCC to address problems caused by the incompatibility of CDMA and GSM networks, in the filing posted in docket 10-208.