The latest round of the USDA ReConnect rural broadband funding program received three times as many applications as there is money. That’s according to USDA’s Rural Utilities Service Administrator Andy Berke. According to Telecompetitor, Berke made his comment on a webcast organized by Broadband.money on Friday.
Round 4, the latest USDA ReConnect round, has a budget of $1.15 billion to cover some of the costs of deploying service to unserved or underserved rural areas. USDA began accepting applications for funding in early September. The application deadline was November 2.
Awards will be made in the form of grants, loans and grant/loan combinations. Funding recipients are required to deploy service supporting speeds of at least 100 Mbps symmetrically. Previous rounds of the program only required providers to deploy service at speeds of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream.
“You have this future that you’re building for in places that you don’t want to get left behind and that’s good,” said Berke. “Congress probably isn’t going to give us $65 billion next year to do this again, and so we’ve got to maximize what we’re getting out of this funding,” he said, referring to the money allocated in the bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Although the budget for the current ReConnect funding round is less than requested, USDA has an additional $750 million available that it plans to use for a future round. That means network operators that aren’t selected from this batch of applications may have another shot at obtaining funding, according to Telecompetitor.
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