In regards to gold-plating, it makes a difference if it's average-schedule or cost-company. If it's the latter, then yes, all actual costs are including in building the rate base. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Frank Bulk Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 6:48 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Cc: rdobbins@cisco.com Subject: Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)

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USF has made it possible for us to serve DSL to almost every customer in our exchanges.

I'm glad to hear it - the reports of how that fund is (un)used are almost overwhelmingly negative, I'm glad some folks, somewhere are benefiting from it.

There's a lot not to like about USF, notably the way it encourages rural telcos to gold-plate everything to increase their rate base, but it still does the same job it's done for the past 80 years or so, make phone service in the boondocks affordable. R's, John PS: My telco has about 8000 lines, but just in case we bave a population boom, their GTD-5 switch can expand to 100,000.