August 19, 2016

Commitments for Funding Years 2016 and 2015

Funding Year 2016. USAC will release Funding Year (FY) 2016 Wave 9 Funding Commitment Decision Letters (FCDLs) on August 19. This wave includes commitments for approved applications for all service types and at all discount levels. As of August 19, FY2016 commitments total over $347.5 million.

On the date the FCDLs are issued, you can access your FCDL notification from the Notifications section of your landing page in the E-rate Productivity Center (EPC).

Funding Year 2015. USAC will release FY2015 Wave 62 FCDLs on August 23. This wave includes commitments for approved requests for all service types and at all discount levels. As of August 19, FY2015 commitments total over $3.31 billion.  

On the day the FCDLs are mailed, you can check to see if you have a commitment by using USAC's Automated Search of Commitments tool. FCDLs for FY2015 will continue to be printed and mailed to applicants and service providers, and emailed to service providers who have signed up to receive electronic notifications.

New Search Commitments Tool for FY2016 

We have recently made some updates to the Search Tools page on the USAC website, including a new search commitments tool for FY2016 and some changes to the URLs for existing tools.

Search Commitments Tool for FY2016

The new Search Commitments tool for FY2016 has been designed with a look and feel similar to the Search Commitments tool for FY2015 and previous funding years.

Users can get national statistics for FY2016 – specifically, total amount committed to date by applicant type, service type, and discount band – and, by clicking on a specific wave number, can access information on commitments in that wave for each state. As with the search commitments tool for FY2015 and previous years, search results can be downloaded in XLS format.

Please note the following:

• The information in this tool will be updated no later than the second day after the date of the most recent wave.
• At this point, we have only developed the functions for a basic search for FY2016 commitment information. Work on the advanced search functions is underway, and the tool will be updated with those functions after that work has been completed and tested.
• We will continue to post individual waves for FY2016 in XLS format, one wave per tab, in the FY2016 Wave Report tool, because some of the useful information contained in this tool is not available in the new Search Commitments tool.
• We are also working on correcting some of the summary calculations in the Search Commitments tool for earlier funding years, and will make a separate announcement when that work has been completed. Applicants interested in summary funding data and/or more detail on individual commitments from earlier funding years should continue to use the Data Retrieval Tool to obtain that information.
• You can access the search tool for FY2015 and previous funding years by clicking the appropriate entry on the Search Tools page.

Web address changes to current FCC Form 470 and 471 tools

To resolve some issues with the display and maintenance of accurate information across certain search tools, we have changed the URLs (the web addresses) for the three tools used to view and/or download current information for FCC Form 470 and FCC Form 471.

Below are the updated links to these three tools:

• View an FCC Form 470 (FY2016-17)
• Download 470 Information (FY2016-17)
• View/Download FCC Forms 471 for FY2016

These tools allow users to search for and either view individual forms or download detailed information from the appropriate form into a spreadsheet. Users enter the appropriate search criteria and the results are displayed on the screen. For the FCC Form 470 tools, results can also be downloaded in HTML or XLS formats.

Please not the following:

• The tools themselves have not changed. They still feature the same fields and the same information. Only the URLs have changed.
• We encourage users who use these tools often or who have bookmarked the old URLs to update their records with the new URLs.
• The URLs for the view and download tools for earlier funding years – and the tools themselves – will not change.

Fall Applicant Training Dates Published 

The cities and dates for the fall applicant training sessions have been published on the Trainings & Outreach page of the USAC website. We are working hard to get the USAC registration pages and the individual hotel information pages posted on our website as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

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