According to reports Frontier just got a $283 million dollar subsidies from the FCC to roll out highspeed internet to 650,000 new rural locations that had previously been listed as areas that weren’t economically viable areas.
“We are already well on our way, with a deadline to reach 40 percent of those homes and businesses — over 500,000 — by year-end 2017,” Frontier said in a recent FCC filing. “We also continue to explore all possible avenues for further expanding broadband in high-cost rural areas, including through the CAF Phase II Auction.”
Some users will see improvements in DSL speeds but others will be seeing a fixed wireless internet service similar to what AT&T has been rolling out. The new system will use the 3.7 to 24 GHz spectrum. Frontier has not announced any speeds but other similar networks have averaged 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps down. That may not seems great to people use to highspeed internet but if you live in a rural area that only offered dial-up, 1.5 down DSL, or satellite internet this is a huge step forward.
“In particular, our companies are in the process of investing more than three billion dollars to bring broadband to more than a million homes and businesses (representing more than two and a half million Americans) each year as part of Phase II of the Connect America Fund (“CAF”) program,” the service providers said in their joint filing. “Given this massive scale of investment – scheduled through year-end 2020 – making this spectrum available as quickly as possible would enable our companies to provide broadband to more Americans, especially in the most rural parts of our footprints. This underutilized spectrum presents the Commission with a rare opportunity to further promote rural broadband expansion.”
The goal is to have the first part of the system live by the end of 2017 and will continue to roll out over the next few years with an end date of 2020.
Source: FierceTelecom
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