Satellite service grants will be accepted for specific areas (the map showing those areas has not yet been published).

Satellite service is designed for those areas where wireline and wireless won’t work, where either would cost over $10,000 per home connected.

Satellite service providers will be obliged to provide CPE for free and to provide service at a price at least 25 percent below prices that the service provider published on December 1, 2009.

The expected cost of service is at most $750 per home.

These may seem like tough conditions, but the RUS is in effect handing over specific areas to satellite providers — and there are not very many of them (although some allow ISPs to resell their service).

In round one, several satellite providers submitted bids covering most of the nation. I preferred those aimed at areas that presented particular challenges to wired and wireless internet providers.

The RUS has set aside up to $100 million for satellite projects. We’re waiting to see which areas have been set aside for satellite, but this looks like a very good opportunity for those service providers that know how to deploy satellite internet service.

Cross posted to WiNOG.

It is therefore no surprise that he took the task of ranking applications to heart and provided a clear, detailed letter (here in .pdf format from the Baller Herbst website) that ranked the various applications involving the state of Vermont.

He chose Vermont CTO Tom Evslin (blog here) to head the stimulus effort of the state of Vermont — a higher profile person than that heading the stimulus effort in many much larger states.

I was surprised, however, to see that the letter says that Fairpoint has done an excellent job of providing broadband to the state of Vermont. At a hearing recently, a Vermont firefighter opposed further sales of lines by Verizon when he said, “In Vermont we once had ‘Ma Bell’ provide our telephone service. Then we had ‘Baby Bell’ service. Sadly, with FairPoint’s acquisition of Verizon’s northern New England properties, we now only have ‘Tinker Bell’ service.”

(The state may soon have power problems too, if nuclear plants are spun off and allowed to go bankrupt.)

The state also claims that the proposals it favors only appear to overlap. I’m certain the federal government will examine that claim.

Proposals not recommended

I think it’s wonderful — and politically courageous — that the state chose to highlight a few proposals it does not recommend. I am particularly pleased that it does not recommend the satellite proposals from EchoStar and Hughes. I agree that they will do little for Vermont.

I agree that Aircell’s proposal for in-flight broadband, while interesting, does not belong in the stimulus.

Vermont expressed some doubts about MegaPath and I have heard similar doubts from others but do not have access to enough information to judge their proposal myself.

I think it’s great that the state criticized so many education proposals as being too expensive or poorly targeted.

Finally, on mapping, the state is justifiably proud of its own mapping project, and of the fact that its mapping project was one of the first to be funded by the federal government.

At the top of the list, the task force placed two public computer projects (about $4 million to $6 million each) which seem to me to be very worthwhile. Detailed information is available for one of them.

I was surprised to see the projects of Hughes and EchoStar recommended so highly. Unless they can reach parts of the state that nobody else can — this is possible — I see no reason for the deployment of satellite when better technologies are available.

I was also surprised to see a Connected Nation project highly recommended — second in sustainable adoption (education) projects behind the highly valuable Douglas County project.

Not on the list was KeyOn, a Las Vegas-based WISP with applications for stimulus projects across the nation.

Finally, I was surprised to see Ikanos Communications listed as “not enough information available to score.” Ikanos may be the largest owner of open internet infrastructure in the U.S.

Parkinson, who says he plans to step down in 2010, appears to have recommended most of the applications in the state of Kansas, including several multistate applications. Kansas is one of the few states to recommend EchoStar’s nationwide satellite deployment. The governor also recommended a large and costly cellular deployment. Several of the projects appear to overlap each other.

The state even recommended a project from Connected Nation, the telcos’ non-profit.

“We’re excited to recommend these 22 applications to the NTIA, and we’re optimistic that many of them will be awarded funding,” said Carole Jordan, Rural Development Division Director for the Kansas Department of Commerce. “All of them show great potential for increasing broadband access to rural Kansas, which will benefit our state economy, create new Kansas jobs and help us fulfill the mission of the federal Recovery Act.”

Applicants were: City of Manchester, City of New Haven, Hartford, West Hartford, and East Hartford. Hartford, CT is the capital of the state and may have had undue influence, but all applications seem reasonable.

The sixth application is from AlphaStar and uses satellite technology. I think that it is not as good as the other five. It is a large project, partially redacted, so the public cannot judge it but based on the information submitted, I think the government should ask for a partial rollout of it in order to prove it works.

The governor of Connecticut also supported a number of large nationwide projects. I think that for some of these projects, the government should request a pilot project in order to prove they work before funding the entire grant request.

Satellite broadband is a special case. Although it can reach virtually anywhere in the U.S. — to any place from which you can see the Southern sky — it has unique flaws.

Satellite signals are transmitted over a sufficiently long distance to introduce latency, a delay of almost a full second that can degrade or even break some applications — especially those employing voice.

I don’t believe that 10 percent of the stimulus should be spent on delivering this lower quality service. Instead, I hope that the stimulus will be spent on delivering the same quality of service to rural areas that is currently enjoyed in wealthy areas of the United States.

I do see a limited use for satellite. There is an application from Motorbrain Consulting, Inc. of Lincoln, Maine, to deliver satellite service to 3,400 homes that have no other option, free to the customer, for 2 years, at a cost of $ 5,571,784. That’s less than $100 per home per month, and seems reasonable.

The state of Maine is mountainous and heavily forested, making it difficult (but not impossible) to bring wireless or fiber service to many homes. I think that Motorbrain’s application has merit.