From the stimulating, er stimulus, food for thought department. One of the big complaints with ARRA you hear regularly in the media is that the mega-stimulus bill didn't include enough funding for actual building of stuff. One of the bright spots is that much of the "stuff" actually funded involved expanding the nation's access to broadband. As regular users of broadband, you know how much it enhances business efficiency in countless ways. So, if government is going to spend, the more on broadband the merrier. A couple broadband initiatives funded by the stimulus bill are particularly of note.

The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) "provides grants to support the deployment of broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas, to enhance broadband capacity at public computer centers, and to encourage sustainable adoption of broadband service." The Department of Agriculture's (and don't ask the CC how broadband is part of agriculture) Rural Utilities Service, along with the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications Information Administration (that's more like it), received several billion dollars for what is called the Broadband Infrastructure Project (BIP): "BIP will make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas. BTOP will provide grants to fund broadband infrastructure, public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption projects." BTOP and BIP are tremendous lures for your telecom and wireless infrastructure clients. And they may well have applied to be involved — maybe they're about to get the good news. But no government money comes without strings attached. So the big question is how they get involved without getting hung up?

Broadband Stimulus Funding: New Rules and Their Implications is a 40-page PowerPoint put together by Howard Symons and Michael Pryor (Mintz, Levin, Cohen, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, PC) that accompanied their recent one-hour, PLI briefing of the same name. The authors' work consists not only of background on the BTOP and BIP projects, but more importantly for your clients' compliance interests, a review of eligibility criteria; application contents; the application evaluation process; and, most importantly, administrative and compliance obligations. Yes, even when we're desperately trying to stimulate a moribund economy, government cash comes with the aforementioned strings, except in this case, they may be special, high-tension wire. These include ARRA reporting requirements; record maintenance requirements and accounting requirements, not to mention a host of other matters of concern, such as environmental impact. But in this environment, every contract helps. So just use the broadband connection you already have to get in on the action.