E-Rate payments send $335,276 to broadband in three Alaska towns

One federal payment signed Aug. 31 sends $302,400 to keep King Salmon connected. The program paying for it is under review at the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering whether to shrink it or end it.

The payment is one of six to SATEO INC, an Anchorage company doing business as Microcom, totaling $335,276. Alongside King Salmon, $19,440 covers Pelican and $1,368 covers Delta Junction. All of it comes through E-Rate, the subsidy that discounts broadband and telecommunications bills for schools and libraries by 20 to 90 percent depending on how poor and how remote the place is.

The spread between those figures is the point. SATEO holds 131 E-Rate awards worth $2.07 million, with a median award of $5,850. The King Salmon payment is about 52 times that. Some communities are cheap to put online and some are not, and the ones that are not are the reason the program exists.

The FCC opened a top-to-bottom review of E-Rate in June. Chairman Brendan Carr has said the commission should consider reducing the program's scope or cutting it altogether, arguing that most schools now have high-speed internet and that the program, nearly 30 years old, may have finished the job it was created to do. The rulemaking also asks whether support should be limited to rural areas, or to places served by only one internet provider.

Alaska organizations have been filing against it. The Association of Alaska School Boards told the commission that ending the program would leave districts absorbing the full cost of broadband, internet and internal network service overnight, a jump of 20 to 90 percent with no room in their budgets to take it. On Aug. 27, the Alaska Superintendents Association and the Alaska Council of School Administrators separately told the FCC that reducing support would fall hardest on remote districts.