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Rural Iowa getting more broadband as Gov. Branstad lauds infrastructure spending
George C. Ford
Aug. 31, 2015 7:12 pm
Four communications providers have received more than $53 million in federal funds to expand high-speed Internet service to nearly 90,000 rural Iowa homes and businesses.
Gov. Terry Branstad said Monday the grants to expand broadband access will enable rural Iowa businesses and communities to compete with their urban counterparts.
'In Iowa, technology and access to broadband Internet is the great equalizer for our rural communities,” he said at a news conference.
'We have put a focus on broadband Internet expansion because if our small businesses are to compete in a global economy, our schools are to have access to an abundance of online learning resources and our farmers are to connect their modern equipment for precision farming, we must connect every acre with broadband infrastructure.”
Two of the four companies will use part of the grants to expand broadband in Linn and Johnson counties.
One of them, CenturyLink of Monroe, La., will use $17.9 million from the Connect America Fund to expand broadband Internet service to nearly 35,000 homes and businesses in the state.
The company will use $602,218 to build out broadband to more than 1.500 homes and businesses in Linn and $203,018 to extend the access to 471 rural customers in Johnson.
In all, CenturyLink accepted $506 million from the Connect America Fund to bring high-speed Internet to 1.2 million rural homes and businesses in 33 states.
The other company, Windstream Communications of Little Rock, Ark., will use its $28.7 million allotment to provide broadband to almost 45,000 rural homes and businesses in Iowa.
The company expects to spend nearly $267,000 in Linn to provide broadband access to 522 homes and businesses. In Johnson, Windstream will use more than $650,000 to extend broadband access to roughly 1,200 homes and businesses.
The other two companies receiving grants that will help expand broadband in Iowa are:
' Consolidated Communications of Mattoon, Ill. It will receive $2.4 million to build out broadband to 3,019 rural Iowa homes and businesses. The company accepted a total of $14 million from the fund to deploy broadband to about 24,700 rural locations in seven states.
' Frontier Communications of Norwalk, Conn. It will use $4.2 million to expand and support broadband Internet to more than 5,400 rural Iowa homes and businesses. The company accepted a total of $283 million from the fund to bring high-speed Internet service to more than 1.3 million rural customers in 28 states.
Branstad noted that lawmakers last session approved a new property tax credit that also will assist in an effort to make Iowa the 'most-connected” state in the Midwest.
But he acknowledged that keeping up with changing communications technology is a moving target. He likened the broadband expansion to efforts last century to bring electrical service to rural Iowa.
'We don't want rural America to get left out of the changes that are taking place,” he said.
The Connect America Fund was created in 2011 by the Federal Communications Commission to subsidize the cost of providing broadband Internet service in rural areas where the cost of deployment might otherwise be cost prohibitive. The fund is supported by contributions from providers of telecommunications based on an assessment on their customer revenues.
The first phase of the Connect America grants provided $438 million to expand broadband to nearly 1.7 million people in more than 637,000 homes and businesses in 45 states and Puerto Rico.
Over the next six years, this new phase of Connect America will provide more than $10 billion to expand broadband-capable networks throughout rural America, without increasing the cost of the program to ratepayers.
The Connect America allocations will provide service capable of delivering Internet service at speeds of at least 10 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps uploads.
Companies accepting Connect America funds must build out broadband to 40 percent of the locations by the end 2017, 60 percent by the end of 2018, 80 percent by the end of 2019 and 100 percent by the end of 2020.