NTCA Representative Offers House Panel Recommendations on RUS Broadband Spending
Congress should continue to back the Rural Utilities Service’s “Broadband Loan program that is subjected to the Farm Bill reauthorization process at or above current funding levels as you formulate recommendations,” testified Craig Cook, chief operations officer of Hill Country…
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Telephone Cooperative in Texas, Thursday on behalf of NTCA before a House Agriculture subcommittee. The committee also should “continue its long history of support for the Telecommunications Infrastructure and Community Connect programs,” Cook said in written testimony. The RUS nonduplication policies should be enshrined in law, he recommended: “Congress should codify a prohibition on USDA financing new fiber or other broadband-capable infrastructure through any RUS or other USDA program where an existing network deployed by a different carrier was also financed through a RUS or other USDA program. This non-duplication provision should apply to all USDA programs, and should also extend to preclude overbuilding of other carriers’ networks that receive USF High-Cost support as administered by the FCC.” He also called permitting regulations “significant obstacles” worth addressing: “While permits serve an important public purpose, we’d encourage streamlining federal approval processes to the extent possible, and to the extent that RUS can help in standardizing processes with land-managing and property-managing agencies and in improving timelines for historical preservation coordination, that would be a significant help in speeding and reducing the costs of deployment.”