The Federal Communications Commission last week allocated nearly $77 million toward efforts to restore cellular service on hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Commissioners on Wednesday unanimously voted to immediately provide carriers with $76.9 million from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, the equivalent of seven months’ worth of support. The USF ordinarily helps defray the cost of deploying cellular service in expensive areas, but the funds released this week can be used to repair infrastructure and re-establish service on the islands.
Hurricane Maria effectively wiped out cellular service in the U.S. territories on late last month, and the FCC reported that 88 percent of cellular sites in Puerto Rico and 67 percent of sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands remained out of service as of Tuesday.
The agency also said FCC staff would help coordinate repair activities.
“Going forward, service providers will have greater flexibility in how they use universal service funding to restore and rebuild their networks,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. “And since we’ve adopted this item so expeditiously, carriers will be able to elect to have accelerated payments begin flowing this month.”
AT&T said Saturday that the company deployed temporary cellular sites to connect 15 additional cities in Puerto Rico over the previous week. Those sites were able to process more than 400,000 calls per day, and the AT&T network overall is supporting more than 9 million calls per day on the island.
Filed Under: Infrastructure
