Cell phones not just a luxury across rural Montana. Group pushes for cell-phone tower in Swan Valley

The ability of your small town to attract, say, a new doctor or small business while the no-cell-service town down the road goes begging is seen as a necessity.

Slowly but none too surely, the number of Montanans experiencing the convenience — and the annoyance — of "being connected" around the clock is growing.

Cell phones, ubiquitous in cities and more populated areas, are becoming just as common in small-town Montana.

Full Story: http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/OPINION01/801060306/1014/OPINION

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USF reform should be fair and impartial

By Jonathan Foxman – President and CEO of Chinook Wireless http://chinookwireless.com .

Reform of the universal service telecommunications system should be accomplished by objectively looking at the real causes of increase and excess in the Universal
Service Fund, not stopping wireless carriers from building cell sites in rural areas.

Rural areas need wireless communications. Rural law enforcement and emergency medical services, as well as farmers, ranchers and other business people, struggle
with poor wireless service every day in the state of Montana. For example, fading or non-existent wireless service can greatly delay reporting of a car crash, in turn
delaying the delivery of emergency medical care at a time when every second counts.

Also, poor rural wireless service discourages businesses from locating in rural areas. Take tourism, the second largest industry in Montana after agriculture.
Tourists and related businesses don’t visit or locate in areas with poor or nonexistent wireless coverage. However, that’s still the norm in many areas of Montana:
low population density and mountainous terrain don’t support a business case for privately funded wireless buildout, as I told the Senate Commerce Committee
when I was asked to testify before it in June.

Congress tried to make sure rural areas wouldn’t be left behind by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, stating that telecommunications services, choices
and prices in rural areas should be comparable to those available in urban areas. The Universal Service Fund, which is supported by fees assessed on long distance
and wireless service bills, was intended to achieve this goal, by leveling the playing field so all competitors in each market would have access to similar funding to
build out rural areas.

As technology has advanced, we’ve seen an explosion in wireless services as consumers in the rural, remote and farming communities have demanded equal access
to modern communications that their urban cousins have enjoyed for years. Yet some want to cap wireless funding and impede carriers’ ability to build wireless
towers in rural areas. Building new infrastructure is a key purpose of the Universal Service Fund; in addition to paying for maintenance of older lines, the fund is
also — and I would argue most importantly to citizens — supposed to help extend modern telecommunications service.

Presently, some at the FCC are convinced that something has to be done to curb the growth of the fund. In fact, the sky is not falling: Long-distance and wireless
companies and their customers pay for the fund; the amount that consumers pay in each month is decreasing, and the cost of wireless service is also decreasing.
It’s critically important to know that growth in the fund has not been caused primarily by the new competitive companies (mostly wireless).

Growth in the fund has been caused by the FCC’s policy that allows wireline carriers to continue drawing over $3 billion each year even though they are losing
customers at an accelerating rate. Growth to wireless carriers has been more than offset by growth in the amount wireless consumers pay in, now running at roughly
$3 billion per year, more than three times what wireless draws out.

Limiting competitors’ access to the fund sends a direct message to rural areas that they are not entitled to the modern telecommunications networks available in
urban areas.

I don’t think rural America deserves that kind of treatment. The American Corn Growers Association, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the National Family
Farm Coalition, the National Grange and other esteemed agricultural groups have signed on to show their support of wireless carriers and rural development.

Meeting the Telecommunications Act’s promise of “reasonably comparable service” in urban and rural areas requires increased funding for rural wireless carriers,
not arbitrary limitations, until consumers can get four bars all the way from Missoula to Idaho Falls.

Foxman is president and CEO of Chinook Wireless http://chinookwireless.com.

http://www.chinookwireless.com/pdf/USF_Reform.pdf

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Group pushes for cell-phone tower in Swan Valley

When two Deer Lodge prison farm escapees headed for the Mission Mountain Range in June, they holed up in the far recesses of the Swan Valley.

The men were desperate.

And they may have known just what they were doing, heading for what Swan Lake resident Sue Ellison says is a 60-mile cell-phone dead zone along the Swan Highway (Montana 83). A chance sighting of the fugitives couldn’t have been translated into a quick cell-phone call to notify authorities.

Full Story: http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2007/12/09/business/bus01.txt