USA: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides opportunities for operators in the provision of broadband services

1. Highlights one state government that is aware of opportunities provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
2. RFI points to goals of State of Texas in regards to telecom for rural economic development
3. Other states may follow with similar plans
4. second tier telecom vendors will benefit as they have the platforms and dexterity to respond by 15 May.

Analysis
Approximately $7 billion will be made available under the NTIA's Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (grants) and the USDA's RUS program (mostly loans) for broadband deployments in unserved, underserved and rural areas with the goals of supporting education, healthcare, public safety and job creation. Of note, NTIA will issue its rules for grant applications mid to late June. Application deadline is rumored to be 30-45 days there after. By setting a MAY 15 deadline for RFI responses, State of Texas should position itself well for grant awards. With a majority of its land mass in rural areas, it is clear that even without clear definitions of "unserved" and "underserved", State of Texas can prioritize and organize projects in a timely but short time frame.

There are three technologies that may be favored for these projects: WiMAX, WiMAX and WiMAX. Only WiMAX can be deployed on such short notice with minimal planning delivering maximum last mile broadband for the least cost per megabit delivered per subscriber. WiMAX vendors that may benefit include: Redline Communications, Solectek, Airspan and Axxcelera all of whom offer fixed WiMAX at 3.65 GHz (easily obtained license). These vendors also offer similar platforms in 4.9 GHz public safety products which will no doubt be a priority for RFI respondents.

Service provider respondents may be mostly local with the possible exception of Clearwire who might be in a position to deploy on short notice to communities where they hold 2.5 GHz licenses. Cisco and Juniper may sell a lot of routers to support these deployments just as Sun will sell a lot of servers as well. Metaswitch and Nortel might also sell a few VoIP softswitch platforms to support VoIP over WiMAX.

Broadband Stimulus: The Next Telecom Boom