Billions Available in Recovery Act Broadband Grants

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Recently the USDA Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) co-released two funding opportunities for Broadband Infrastructure. An initial review of these opportunities seemed to indicate that most of the $$s were for Broadband providers. However, USDA and DoC recently released a clarification of these opportunities that now clarifies that indeed there are some opportunities for medical and healthcare providers. Below is language from this clarification to help you determine if perhaps you have a project that would be grant worthy. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to post your questions here in the blog and I am happy to help clarify even further.

"Can I apply for a Broadband Infrastructure project that will provide high capacity bandwidth to community anchor institutions? Are the participating institutions required to be in unserved or underserved areas?"

Community anchor institution (which include schools, libraries, medical and healthcare providers, public safety entities, community colleges and other institutions of higher education) projects are eligible. Projects of this nature should be characterized as middle mile projects as they create a point-to-point network connecting a relatively small number of facilities. This would be in contrast to a last mile project which, because of the last mile coverage obligation, must provide broadband access to all end users – including all community anchor institutions, businesses, and households in the proposed funded service area. (See NOFA section V.C.2.d.)  To be eligible for BIP or BTOP funding, all middle mile projects (including middle mile community anchor institution projects) must have at least one point of interconnection located in an unserved or underserved area. (See NOFA sections III (defining “underserved area”), V.C.3, and VI.C.1.c.) For BTOP evaluation purposes, the degree to which middle mile projects serve unserved and underserved areas is assessed during scoring and evaluation, with additional consideration provided to projects that have more interconnection points in unserved and underserved areas. (See NOFA section VII.A.2.c.ii.) However, it is possible that the majority of a middle mile project will be located in areas that are not unserved or underserved. To maximize BTOP’s impact and in consideration of its funding constraints, NTIA has opted to focus on areas that have no broadband or inadequate broadband rather than supporting projects located in areas with more substantial broadband coverage.