The Universal Service high-cost fund is meant to help rural providers offer modern telecommunications services at affordable rates, equivalent to urban rates. Early in its existence, HCF helped maintain affordable monthly telephone bills, and in recent years it has focused on building rural broadband networks. Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to bring high-cost fund into the coming post-broadband-construction AI era.
“Now is a good time to make sure that we have a plan,” said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr during the Commission’s monthly agenda meeting. “That way we can ensure that these programs keep pace with the times and continue to deliver great results for the American people. Today’s item takes an important step in that direction.”
Much of the NPRM deals with technical questions, such as how to adjust the Alternative Connect America Cost Model (A-CAM) the Commission uses to calculate payments to broadband providers.
However, the attention of those who comment on the FCC’s NPRM will likely be on broader questions affecting the future role of the high-cost fund:
- What types of Universal Service support will be needed in areas where programs such as Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) have established broadband service and sometimes created competitive services?
- How should the emergence of “ubiquitous” low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite services affect the high-cost fund mechanism?
- How might high-cost fund reform and USF dollars affect the ongoing IP transition?
Commissioner Anna Gomez, while acknowledging the rapid growth of satellite connections and their importance in remote areas, warned that satellite service may not be enough to keep pace in the coming era.
“We must evaluate with rigor whether these services can reliably support the performance needed for advanced applications, including AI workloads, telehealth, precision agriculture, and other latency- and capacity-sensitive uses,” Gomez said. “This NPRM asks the right questions about how to modernize legacy mechanisms, how to align federal programs, and how to avoid inefficient duplication of support.”
FCC moves beyond the high-cost fund: National Broadband Map and robocalls
The remaining items in the Commission’s May meeting agenda included measures to streamline programs to reduce regulatory burden. For example, the Commission changed the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) process for creating the National Broadband Map, including reducing some of the complexities in making challenges to the “fabric,” the database of addresses that could receive broadband service.
Commissioners agreed that the map, which was introduced in 2022, and the BDC process are great improvements over the broadband data that existed before, but work to ensure the map’s accuracy is an ongoing task. “As we continue to use the map to inform our policy decisions, we must be honest about the map’s limitations and build in processes to catch and correct errors before they compound,” Gomez said.
The FCC also adopted a Further NPRM to improve the “know-your-upstream-provider” requirements in the STIR/SHAKEN framework fighting illegal robocalls. The Commission refined the due diligence process verifying whether upstream calling entities are legitimate and discontinuing illegal calls.
