McCaskill Raises Concerns About FCC's CAF II Auction Proposal
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., highlighted Missouri stakeholders’ concerns about the FCC’s rules for the upcoming CAF II auction, in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released Monday. McCaskill said she and Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., discussed rural broadband deployment…
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issues during a roundtable last week at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia. Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives members at the roundtable are concerned the FCC’s CAF II auction proposal as currently structured “lacks sufficient upfront review to prevent bidders from winning and ultimately failing to deliver the service at the appropriate speeds,” McCaskill said. “Such a result would not only lead to waste and fraud of scarce universal service funds but, more importantly, would leave communities in rural Missouri without access to broadband.” Areas of rural Missouri need to have “access to reliable, high speed broadband networks capable of delivering 1 Gig service, which is comparable to services in urban areas,” McCaskill said. The CAF II auction “presents a tremendous opportunity to connect those unserved Missouri areas,” but the FCC must “adopt safeguards to ensure that entities only bid in the auction if they are capable of delivering the requisite speed and capacity.” AMEC members believe the FCC could ensure those safeguards by directing the Universal Service Administrative Co. to “hire a third-party to review the short-form applications,” McCaskill said.