The first round of stimulus funding saw almost 2200 applications making requests for almost $28 billion from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) earlier in the month according to the NTIA, which is one of the government agencies that has been tasked with handing out a large portion of the $7.2 billion in funding.
With just $4 billion in funding available for the first round of the stimulus program the amount applied for was almost seven times higher than the amount on the table for funding.
Based on a 400 word description released about each of the applications an analysis was carried out on the data and a list was created, which was then broken down into the technology used for the last mile of service. It was found from the list that the last-mile access applications were predominantly fiber and WiMAX.
In total 181 fiber applications were made for a total of $3.7 billion, whilst 307 WiMAX applications were made for $1.6 billion in funding according to the analysis. A total of $14.2 billion is currently being requested by 1130 last-mile applications altogether. A proposal from Agri-Valley Communications, however, is looking to use the 700MHz spectrum band to provide LTE services to areas of Michigan, and is the only application so far to have put forward an LTE-based plan.
A request for a massive $983 million for public computer centres, which is 13 percent of the total funding of $7.2 billion that has been made available, was submitted by RADGOV and is the largest single grant application to be submitted so far according to the analysis. Public computer centre project were, however, only granted $50 million in funding during the first round of applications, which is a little ironic.
Source – Fierce Broadband Wireless