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Hello, my name is Greg Ashcraft and I am the CFO for South Arkansas Telephone Company and a member of the Arkansas Broadband Advisory Council. South Arkansas Telephone Company is a small incumbent local exchange company (ILEC) in south Arkansas with 3,900 customers. I am here today representing South Arkansas Telephone Company and 14 other small independents that are not represented on this panel. I work closely with these 14 companies on policy development. The small rural Arkansas telephone companies understand the importance of Broadband to the medical, educational, social and economic needs for rural Arkansans and Americans. The small telephone companies in Arkansas have worked very hard in recent years to deploy broadband to their customers. Evidence of our work is included in this data that is over a year old: - Broadband service is available in 100% of the exchanges of these companies
- Broadband had been made available to 82% of the total customers of the rural ILECs
- Approximately 11% of the customers of the rural ILECs had subscribed to Broadband
The cost of service is reasonable and the companies are working hard to finish providing broadband to the remaining 18% that they had not reached a year ago and to encourage more households to subscribe to broadband service. The benefit of ILEC broadband service includes: - the historical reliability of service
- The community based owners and the adherent to these companies of public service commission customer service rules that protect customers and allow a supervised complaint process in event of dispute.
The broadband available through these small companies is backed-up by power generators and by engineered lines that are programmed to allow alternate facilities to be used to maintain service, in the event of any disaster or attack. The broadband deployment in these rural companies should be understood as service to some of the most rural areas of Arkansas. For instance South Arkansas Telephone Company has 2 customers per route mile of cable and many of the other 14 companies have similar statistics. The 82 % availability of broadband is not because of population density, but in spite of population density. This wire-line service has been provided to these rural customers with the reasonable reliability of revenue streams, such as the Federal Universal Service and NECA pools. These services will continue to be provided on a fair, reasonable, affordable and community basis in the coming years. One of the problems is that making broadband available to the remaining 18% of these companies customer base will be the most expensive deployment; however the rural ILECs are dedicated to providing 100% deployment. The rural companies are leaders in deploying broadband to rural areas due to the reliability and dependability of Federal Universal Service and NECA pools in the past. It is important that these pools be protected to ensure continue availability of broadband to the rural citizens in the future. We would urge this Committee to join the efforts of the rural telephone companies in Arkansas, and the efforts of the Joint Board and the FCC, to stabilize the USF, continue to support broadband in the USF and protect the long-term viability of the USF.
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