June 28, 2019

TIP OF THE WEEK:  Register for our July and August webinars. In July, we will conduct office hours for competitive bidding and the FCC Form 470. In August we will discuss the invoicing process for applicants and service providers. For more information, please visit our Webinars page.

Note: USAC will not issue an SL News Brief next Friday, July 5, 2019 due to the Independence Day holiday. Also, the Client Service Bureau will be closed Thursday, July 4, 2019.

Commitments for Funding Year 2019

Funding Year 2019. USAC released Funding Year (FY) 2019 Wave 10 Funding Commitment Decision Letters (FCDLs) on June 27. As of June 28, FY2019 commitments total just over $1.00 billion.

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

Note: The commitment numbers we report each week are the totals of the commitments as they were originally issued. These totals do not take into account any subsequent (post-commitment) changes to those commitments.

FY2020 FCC Form 470 Reminders

Early next week, the FY2020 FCC Form 470 will be available in EPC. Applicants with long procurement cycles or who have other reasons for starting their FY2020 competitive bidding processes well in advance of the funding year will be able to complete and certify this form.

The FCC Form 470 must be filed online in EPC.

To start an FCC Form 470, you must have an EPC login and password. Your EPC account administrator can set up a user account for you if you do not already have one. After your account is set up, you can log in to EPC and click the FCC Form 470 link at the top of your landing page to start an FCC Form 470.

Before you start, you should review the Applicant Process Step 1: Competitive Bidding page, the FCC Form 470 Filing page, the FCC Form 470 User Guide, and the FCC Form 470 filing videos.

Some information must be completed in your organization's profile in EPC before you can file a program form.

Your billed entity information – including address and contact information, attributes for the schools in a school district or libraries in a library system, and other pertinent data – is pulled into program forms that you file from your organization's profile in EPC. You should review your profile information and make any necessary changes before you start your form.

If you issue a request for proposal (RFP) and/or RFP documents, they must be uploaded to the FCC Form 470.

If you are issuing an RFP and/or one or more RFP documents, you are required to upload those documents to your FCC Form 470. We use "RFP" and "RFP document" generically to refer to any bidding document that describes your project and requested services in more detail than that provided in the data entry fields on the FCC Form 470.

An RFP document can be a formal bidding document – for example, an invitation for bid (IFB) or request for quote (RFQ) – or it could be any document issued as part of your competitive bidding process to provide more information to potential bidders. It is not sufficient for you to upload a document that contains a link to another website where the RFP can be accessed (for example, a procurement portal). The actual RFP itself (along with all subsequent addenda) must be made publicly available through USAC's website by uploading the RFP in EPC.

In addition, RFP documents issued AFTER an FCC Form 470 is certified and posted MUST be uploaded to that certified FCC Form 470. Note that if you did not add an RFP document to your original form before it was certified, you cannot add an RFP document later – instead, to include an RFP document, you must attach the document to a new FCC Form 470 and then certify that form.

Certify the form online to post it to the USAC website.

In EPC, the FCC Form 470 is not posted to the USAC website until it is certified. If the user who creates the form does not also have the necessary rights (permissions) to certify it, EPC will create a task for users within the organization who do.

• Users with partial rights to the FCC Form 470 can complete the form but cannot certify the form.
• Users with full rights to the FCC Form 470 can complete, edit, and certify the form in EPC.

Your receipt notification will appear in your EPC News feed shortly after you certify your form.

Your FCC Form 470 Receipt Notification Letter (RNL) will appear in the News tab in your EPC account shortly after you certify your form. Requests to correct certain errors can be submitted through EPC by clicking Related Actions in the form as described above.

You can also access your RNL by navigating to your FCC Form 470 and clicking the News option from the menu at the top of the page (NOT the News tab). In this way, you will only see news items that apply to this form.

Service providers can view filed FCC Forms 470 either through EPC or through the USAC website.

EPC has a search and download function that will allow service providers with accounts in EPC to search for certified FCC Forms 470. The form data from the search results can be downloaded as a set of .CSV files.

Service providers will also be able to view PDF versions of FY2020 FCC Forms 470 along with any associated RFP documents by using the FCC Form 470 search tools on the Search Tools page on the USAC website.

Update on Emails Sent from EPC

We have recently become aware that some of the email notifications sent from EPC to applicants and service providers are coming from more than one sender and more than one domain at USAC.

Starting next week, all email communications sent directly from EPC will come from the domain portal.usac.org. Assigned tasks will come directly from admin@portal.usac.org. You can add this domain and this email address to your safe senders list to make sure that you will receive these communications.

Please note that we cannot access or respond to replies sent to this email address.