GAO Cites Barriers to Tribal Broadband, Suggests Federal Program Changes
Barriers remain to high-speed Internet access among 21 tribes interviewed, including high poverty rates and high costs to connecting remote tribal villages, GAO said in congressional testimony Wednesday that grew out of a January report. The GAO said FCC USF…
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subsidy programs and the grant programs of the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service "are interrelated," but the agencies "do not coordinate to develop joint outreach and training, which could result in inefficient use of federal resources and missed opportunities for resource leveraging." The FCC hasn't developed performance goals and measures for improving tribal broadband availability, said GAO, which suggested the commission "could establish baseline measures to track its progress by using, for example, the National Broadband Map," which has data on tribal Internet availability. "The FCC also lacks both reliable data on high-speed Internet access and performance goals and measures for high-speed Internet access by tribal institutions -- such as schools and libraries," the GAO said, saying the commission "has neither defined 'tribal' on its E-rate application nor set any performance goals for the program's impact on tribal institutions." Without such goals and measures, the FCC can't assess the impact of its efforts, it said. The FCC agreed with the recommendations, the GAO said.