August 26, 2016

Commitments for Funding Years 2016 and 2015

Funding Year 2016. USAC will release Funding Year (FY) 2016 Wave 10 Funding Commitment Decision Letters (FCDLs) on August 26. This wave includes commitments for approved applications for all service types and at all discount levels. As of August 26, FY2016 commitments total over $405.8 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 63 FCDLs on September 2. This wave includes commitments for approved requests for all service types and at all discount levels. As of August 26, 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.

Fall Applicant Training Dates and Locations Announced 

Each year, USAC conducts eight training session for applicants around the country. Following are the dates and locations of the training sessions for fall 2016:

You can access more information, register for the training with USAC, and reserve a hotel room on the Trainings & Outreach page on the USAC website.

Register with USAC

To register for a training, click the link on the Trainings & Outreach page for the city and date of the training you would like to attend. You will receive an email with a confirmation number after you complete the registration process.

• If the training you would like to attend has gone to a waiting list, we will put you on the waiting list after you complete the registration form. Because we work the waiting lists on a first-come, first-served basis, it is to your advantage to register as soon as possible.

We will post an agenda and the training presentations to the Trainings & Outreach page as soon as they are available.

Reserve a room with the hotel

If you would like to reserve a room at the conference hotel for the training you have chosen, you must do that separately from your registration with USAC. Information on the conference hotel for each training is posted on the appropriate training page.

Each hotel may provide a separate link to register for the USAC training, a special telephone number, and/or a conference code. Please follow the instructions provided on the page for the conference hotel associated with your training session. Each hotel page provides information specific to that hotel, including directions to the hotel and the hotel's reservation cancellation policies.

If you have any questions about the training, you can email USAC.

Update on Service Provider .RSP Files 

Service providers who sign up for electronic notifications can receive some of the information contained in certain program letters in an electronic file. For Receipt Acknowledgment Letters (RALs), the names of these files feature the extension *.rsp. We therefore refer to these files as .RSP files.

For FY2015 and previous funding years, these files are generated through our legacy system and emailed to service providers, one file per Service Provider Identification Number or SPIN (also called a service provider 498 ID). For FY2016 and future funding years, these files are created and can be generated through a link at the bottom of the RAL in the service provider's News feed in the E-rate Productivity Center.

Many service providers have had difficulty uploading the .RSP files for FY2016 into their systems. USAC has reviewed the FY2016 files and – with the assistance of some external service provider testers – modified the FY2016 file formats so that they can be successfully uploaded.

We plan to deploy the modifications to the .RSP files tonight. After the modifications have been deployed, service providers will be able to generate a complete set of FY2016 .RSP files at one time by following the steps below:

• Log in to your account in EPC.
• Under the Actions tab, choose "Search and Export Certified Form 471 Funding Request(s)."
• Enter "2/3/2016" in the "After" field (the first day of the FY2016 filing window) and today's date as the "Before" date.
• Enter your SPIN in the "Service Provider (SPIN)" field.
• Click the "Submit" button.
• You will then see a report titled "FCC Certified Form 471 Funding Request Report" in HTML format, sorted by Funding Request Number (FRN). (If you are interested in specific information on one of the applications, you can click any active link in the appropriate line. We suggest that you open that link in a new window or tab so that you can return to the Funding Request Report page when you are done.)
• To generate an .RSP file, click the button marked "Export Search Results" at the bottom of the Funding Request Report page.
• On the resulting "FCC Form 471 Funding Request Search Results Export" page, click the "Close" button.
• A task then appears in your Tasks menu, titled "Download FCC Form 471 Funding Request Search Results CSV Generated at [date and time]." Click on the task title.
• On the resulting "Download FCC Form 471 Funding Request Search Results CSV File" page, click the link to the file itself. You will then be able to access, open, or save the file, which has an .RSP file extension.

We will also replace the current description of the .RSP files on the Electronic Notifications page on the USAC website with an updated version that contains the correct values for the fields in .RSP files for FY2016 and for previous funding years.

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