Satellite broadband operators have finally benefitted from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Program, netting an aggregate US$100m in grants.
Hughes Networks Systems (HNS) was the biggest winner, being awarded US$58.78m by the…
Satellite broadband operators have finally benefitted from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Program, netting an aggregate US$100m in grants.
Hughes Networks Systems (HNS) was the biggest winner, being awarded US$58.78m by the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The company said that it would use the money to accelerate the take-up by eligible new HughesNet subscribers. HNS currently has over 540,000 satellite broadband subscribers across the US. According to the White House release, around 258,685 people and 3,200 businesses nationwide stand to benefit from this grant.
HNS’ largest rival WildBlue received US$19.53m which it plans to use to provide satellite broadband services to approximately 110,150 people and 4,896 businesses in the West and Midwest of the country.
EchoStar netted US$14.16m via it subsidiary Echostar XI Operating LLC and will use the award to serve 42,478 people and 1,888 businesses in the Eastern and Midwestern regions. Finally, Gilat subsidiary Spacenet was granted US$7.53m to expand its broadband services to areas of Alaska and Hawaii.
The awards were made as part of 94 Recovery Act investments in broadband projects announced by US Vice President Joe Biden on August 18. The value of these investments totalled US$1.8bn and will be administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
In total, US$7.2bn has been set aside from the US$787bn 2009 Recovery Act to develop broadband access in unserved and underserved communities across the United States. Satellite broadband operators had initially hoped to receive a large portion of this but these hopes were dashed when it became apparent that the government intended to use the vast majority of this to help fund the roll out of costly terrestrial fibre-optic networks. This was in part because of the extra jobs the network construction would create and due to the state’s desire to supply US households with affordable broadband at speeds of 100 Mb/s second by 2020, far beyond what satellite can currently offer. To that end, in early 2010, the Department of Agriculture’s RUS stated that it would set aside US$100m for satellite-specific projects.
