House Panel Urges FCC to Simplify Broadband Waiver Process
The FCC must take steps to simplify and reduce the costs for small carriers to apply for waivers to the commission’s recent USF reform program, said members of the House Small Business Committee during a hearing Wednesday. Subcommittee Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., said the waiver process is overly burdensome for small businesses, while Rep. Mark Critz, D-Pa., said small carriers are paying up to $300,000 to apply for the program.
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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told members that a waiver requires the “basic financial information to evaluate a waiver request to make sure money is going where it should be going.” He said the commission is working with nine companies who submitted waiver requests to ensure that the process is efficient and protects the money in the fund. Genachowski separately told Velázquez that the agency plans to take the next steps on overhauling special access rules “in the next several weeks.”
"This is your waiver process,” Landry said as he slapped what appeared to be a three-inch stack of application materials onto the dais. “I've got a company in my district that has already spent over $124,000 and they still haven’t been able to complete the process,” he said. “They are telling me that if they don’t get the waiver they will lose the business.”
Genachowski would not offer his estimate of what it actually costs small carriers to complete the FCC’s waiver process but said: “It would cost a very small fraction of the millions of dollars of public money they would receive.” As for the breadth of the material in the request, Genachowski said: “In many cases the filings are large because they include pre-existing documents like financial reports.” Landry was not assuaged by Genachowski’s response. “You leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling that everything is going to be taken care of. But this doesn’t look like a waiver process that is simple,” Landry said. “$120,000 is not chump change."
Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., urged the FCC to bring more certainty and predictability to its reform processes, specifically with respect to the commission’s regression analysis. “We don’t want to see businesses that are chasing this moving target, it seems these caps change every year,” said West. Genachowski agreed, “these projects are very capital-intensive and in order to do long term loans we need visibility going forward.”
West asked if the costs associated with the FCC’s reform of USF and intercarrier compensation amounts to a “bailout.” Genachowski said “not at all” and reaffirmed that the commission recognizes the fiscal pressures facing Congress.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling touted the agency’s broadband networks as a way to “prime the pump” for private sector investment in underserved areas. The agency’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program has focused on “middle mile” projects that brought fiber to anchor institutions like schools, libraries and hospitals and made it cheap and easy for wireless providers to stand up cell towers in rural America, he said. “We see this multiplying over time as other companies are able to take advantage of investment,” said Strickling.