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SLD Releases Year 5 Demand Estimates
Message Posted March 6, 2002
The SLD has just released their demand estimates for Year 5. Basically, it
shows that 36,000 applications were submitted during the window (about the same as last year) requesting $5.736 billion. As you know, the annual funding cap is $2.25 billion.
These figures tell us two very important things: 1) There is enough funding available for ALL approved Telecommunications and Internet Access requests; and 2) There is little remaining for Internal Connections. As far as internal connections, although there is almost exactly the same amount available after all telecom and Internet requests are funded ($430million), the 90% applicants have requested $2.6 billion (almost $1 billion more than last year). While it's just a guess, we're pretty certain that again there will be no internal connections funding for any applicant at the 80% discount threshold and below. In fact, there may not even be enough funding for all 90% internal connections requests. If this is the case, the FCC will have to determine how to distribute the available funds.
Also of interest:
30% discount band requests are up 260%
40%, 50%, and 60% discount band requests are all down about 20%
80% discount band requests are down 36%
90% discount band requests are up 40%
A copy of the SLD's summary table of demand estimates, is available on the SLD Web site at: http://www.sl.universalservice.org/data/xls/FY5%20Demand%20Estimate%20Breakdown.xls.
A comparable document from Year 4 is available in the SLD Web site's archives at:
http://www.sl.universalservice.org/data/pdf/DemEst02r.pdf.
Julie Tritt Schell
jtschell@comcast.net
(717) 730.7133 (voice)
(717) 730.9060 (fax)
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