The bill, introduced May 1, aimed to find middle ground between competing telecom companies, consumers and local governments, Stevens said in a written statement introducing the bill.

The legislation is a compilation of several bills introduced to Congress in recent months, Stevens said. The measure heavily references the need to deploy broadband services to areas that have no Internet services or are underserved in the market.

The biggest impacts to Alaskans are in the proposed changes to the Universal Service Fund, a federal program that takes a percentage of telecom company revenues to help provide telephone and Internet services to rural communities, as well as to low-income individuals, and to schools and libraries. The fund also subsidizes telehealth efforts.

Representatives from an industry trade association and one of the state's largest telecom providers were still pouring over the details of the bill in the days after it was submitted. From what they had deciphered, however, they said the changes to USF should help bring affordable services to more of Alaska's rural communities.

"USF is bordering on being insufficient," said Jim Rowe, executive director of the Alaska Telephone Association, an industry trade group. "To Alaska and the U.S., (the proposals in the measure) will give it security and sustainability that is not there now. It gives confidence to rural America that we can continue to have affordable access. And Alaska will be able to share in the economic opportunities available by accessing the World Wide Web."

Tina Pidgeon, vice president of regulatory affairs for General Communications Inc., said some provisions of the bill would also help bring additional providers to communities.

"In Alaska, it preserves universal service and be able to do so so that we can have a sustainable fund that preserves the incumbent carrier, and at the same time allow a new competitive environment," she said. "At GCI, universal service is important to our business because it allows us to be able to provide services from the same starting point than an existing provider."

Alaska Communications Systems, the state's other major telecommunications provider, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Another look at funding universal service

Most of Alaska's telecom companies receive some USF money to provide services throughout rural Alaska. Anchorage is the state's only community that is not considered rural.

Americans who have a working land line, a cell phone or a broadband connection probably already pay into the USF, visible by a fee noted on telecom bills. Alaskans also pay into a state USF account.

The federal rate is 3.05 percent of a customer's total revenues for long distance, international and wireless calls. The Alaska fund, overseen by the Regulatory Commission of Alaska's Universal Service Administration Co., set a rate of 1.2 percent of a customer's local telephone and cell phone activity.

This measure adds companies that provide voice over Internet Protocol services, known as Vo-IP, which typically runs through Internet lines and not through traditional phone lines.

Since the growing number of Vo-IP customers tap into phone lines, users should pay into the USF, Stevens' bill noted.

Some Vo-IP companies already pay into the fund, but the current law is murky on the requirement, as such a service had not been considered when the previous telecom bill was written in 1996.

The Federal Communications Commission sets the USF rate; currently a percentage of a telecom company's revenues. The new legislation proposes to offer the FCC other options in setting future rates.

The agency could continue to look at the revenues generated through local and long distance phone calls by consumers, or it could design a rate based on the amount of working phone numbers a company has. Rates could also be set based on a company's network capacity, including its potential broadband connections. Or the agency could use any combination of those factors.

The measure would also require that carriers receiving USF money for a particular community - to provide phone service, for example - to offer broadband service within five years. A company may request a wavier if the cost for providing the service is shown to be too high, is not technically feasible or would hurt the company's ability to provide the original service.

A separate broadband fund of $500 million a year would help bring broadband to unserved areas. Satellite carriers would be eligible for those funds. In Alaska, satellite is the only way to currently provide phone and Internet service to many of the state's most remote areas.

The changes under USF would also tighten eligibility for carriers to receive funding, and establishes waste, fraud and abuse reviews.

One key change that could help bring broadband to rural Alaska markets is a move to allow local governments to get into the Internet business, so long as they don't compete with the private sector.

If a community has no broadband provider, the measure would allow local governments to enter into partnerships with private carriers through an open bidding process. The local government could begin to offer service itself if no private company bid, or the bids came in higher than the cost at which the government could provide the service.

Another key change that would benefit Alaska, most notably in a major earthquake, includes a measure to improve the interoperable communications among the nation's first responders. This would provide grant initiatives so that federal, state and local emergency responders could acquire communications equipment that could "talk" to each other.

This stems primarily from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, where first responders had different communications radios that couldn't connect with each other.

The measure also directs the FCC to require that satellite carriers offer the same services, as much as is feasible, in Alaska and Hawaii that they offer in the Lower 48 states.

The measure is titled the Communications, Consumer's Choice and Broadband Deployment Act.