NLC FAQ

Eligible project costs include terrestrial capital expenses directly related to a qualified broadband project, including design, construction, engineering, make readies, permitting expenses and validation of service. Maintenance or operating expenses related to the project do not qualify as an eligible expense.

CPF recipients may use funds for middle-mile broadband grant projects. However, the purpose of the grant is to deploy last-mile broadband infrastructure to residential and business locations in unserved areas within Indiana. Grant dollars can only be used for middle-mile related costs if it is necessary in order to provide last-mile service.

Areas that do not currently have fixed service of at least actual 100 Mbps download speed and 20 Mbps upload speed.

The maximum grant amount per project is $5 million.

The Office of Community and Rural Affairs is technology agnostic and will not select an application based solely on the proposed technology solution.

Because the funds allocated to this program are part of Indiana’s appropriation of the US Department of Treasury’s Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, projects that provide technology solutions of 100 Mbps/100 Mbps or greater will receive priority of funding. All proposed projects must be at least 100/20 to be considered eligible.

Providers have multiple opportunities to bring attention to potential issues regarding OCRA’s address lists. Providers can work with county governments to mark issues on the address template they were sent and may also send them directly to our inbox at nlc@ocra.in.gov.  Ineligible addresses can also be challenged through the NLC Round 4 challenge process.

Providers may work with county commissioners to add potential missing addresses onto the “county address template”, or they may send addresses directly to OCRA during the LOI phase.

NLC Awards are made by passing to discreet addresses rather than by census block. An application must commit to these addresses rather than a territory.

The addresses in project areas must be in contiguous counties.

Any service address that has already received NLC Broadband Grant funding or was allocated funding from the federal Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is not eligible. Service addresses where actual speeds are more than 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream within a census block that received other federal funding such as The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) fund, Connect America Fund, Broadband Technology Opportunities Fund, or State Broad Initiative are not eligible for NLC funding. Any service address that currently has 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream is ineligible for funding.

OCRA has provided unserved and underserved addresses to each county from the latest 477 FCC fabric level data. We are expecting county governments to select addresses and work with local providers to add census block data to those addresses before returning the address list to OCRA for each county. Please note that the awarded locations for grants will be made at the address level. The census blocks are being added for reference purposes only.

Service addresses that were challenged in previous rounds are not applied in Round 4. The focus remains on the unserved service addresses within Indiana. Challengers will need to submit another challenge against the service addresses and census blocks proposed in the eligible address pool.

Non-terrestrial providers will not be eligible to challenge census blocks unless they meet the criteria in the “qualified broadband provider” definition.

The dataset is based on version 2 of the FCC’s fabric data and the most recent provider data.

Fixed wireless is an allowable technology type under the terms of the program and may submit challenges to proposed addresses.

Please refer to section II of the challenge phase instruction on the OCRA website. Please note that all eligible projects require a minimum of 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream, instead of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream.

Technical Specifications submitted as part of a challenge are not required to have a signature or stamp from a PE. The affidavit submitted must verify that the challenger has the capacity to provide minimum actual speeds of 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream, and that the broadband infrastructure is designed to meet the identified needs of the challenged service addresses and census blocks.

If service can be deployed within ten days, documentation will need to include a service order record, or work order for construction to the premise, or verification of service of at least 100/20 for each address. Other types of documents are outlined in the Challenge Phase Instructions.

There is not specific documentation that must be included for planned construction aside from the required documents outlined in the Challenge Phase Instructions.

Challenges are not based on Form 477 data alone. A Challenger may submit a challenge based on whether the entity is already providing eligible broadband service, can deploy service to an address in ten days or has the ability to verify plans to provide service by 18 months from the date of challenge with adequate information. OCRA officials may or may not reach out to the provider for further verification.

OCRA anticipates publishing the challenge decisions on the website in time to allow applicants to make corresponding adjustments to their applications prior to the submission deadline. An announcement will be sent out when the information is available. OCRA plans to notify applicants if their proposed project area is impacted by the challenge determinations.

The names of the organizations that have submitted a valid challenge will be published with the validly challenged address level data and census blocks. If there are multiple organizations, then all names will be noted by census block.

Challengers will receive an email from OCRA stating whether a challenge is considered valid or invalid, and if invalid, a specific reason will be stated in the email.

The address level data submitted by a challenger will be made publicly available. OCRA will utilize the address level information submitted by both the applicant and challenger during the Full Application review and scoring period to evaluate individual locations and whether or not they are eligible to receive funding under the program requirements.

If an applicant chooses to include a validly challenged service address or census block in their Full Application it will not necessarily eliminate the application from consideration, as long as the application is competitive through the review process. If an application is competitive, OCRA may choose to negotiate project areas with an applicant by utilizing the address level data provided to the Office by both the applicant and the challenger.

There will not be a direct appeal process for applicants to appeal a challenge decision. Applicants may choose to provide additional evidence that an area should be considered unserved. OCRA may fund partially served census blocks if the addresses proposed do not overlap with an incumbent provider’s service areas that meet the 100/20 actual speed minimum.

There will not be a direct appeal process for challengers that receive an invalid challenge. Decisions will be based on the content and form of the required documentation outlined in the Challenge Phase Instructions document available on the website.

The content and form of the requirements are very similar but some of the requirements have changed based on legislation passed in the 2023 legislative session.

Applicants may resubmit proposed project areas from previous rounds, provided they are included in the pre-determined eligible address pool.

Applicants may reference the grant program and OCRA in their efforts to obtain support, but may not utilize the logos.

Any letter of support should reflect the time period for the current funding round, and in the case of Round III, all letters should be dated no earlier than July 1, 2021.

An applicant should include the cause number in the Project Narrative document, and may also choose to include a pdf copy of their CTA as an appendix though this is not required.

Local match must be provided in the form of cash. Tax abatements would not qualify as cash match.

The applicant may use its own employees and request reimbursement for those hours under the appropriate line item. For example, if the employee completed construction related to the project, the grantee would request reimbursement under the construction budget category for this work.

OCRA does not require a specific format or set of questions to be utilized in a survey to gather unserved data. It is up to each applicant to determine the most applicable question set for the proposed area. There is an Excel Survey data template included in Round III’s application instruction.

OCRA does not give preference to a specific tool.

A preliminary technical evaluation of the project is required. It must include a project cost estimate, project schedule and maps showing the proposed project area. It should be certified by a Professional Engineer (PE).

The Competitive Application phase, as outlined in the 2021 Indiana Legislation, is when an applicant can submit a Competitive Application in response to a published initial Full Application indicating the competitive applicant could provide eligible broadband service for at least the same service level and to the same project area at a lower cost to the state.

The Competitive Application must have the same address level data and census blocks as the Full Application it is based on.  To be considered, the Competitive Application must have a lower grant request than the initial Full Application for at least the same service level for all of the project area.

Since the Competitive Application is based on service addresses and census blocks in a submitted Full Application, all of the service addresses have been reviewed and determined eligible for inclusion in an application.

The Competitive Application must meet all of the requirements as a Full Application. The requirements are outlined in the NLC Round 4 instructions.

Competitive Applications will be scored just like a Full Application. Scoring Criteria is outlined in the NLC Round III instructions.

Passing is an address that service is/would be available at the location. OCRA has identified four types of passings: household, business, anchor institution and farm/agribusinesses. Business is defined as all business types, home-based businesses, and work-at-home/telecommuter use of broadband. Anchor institution is defined as community facilities including public safety buildings like fire and police buildings; hospitals, educational buildings, community centers, libraries; and city, county, state and town buildings.

Terrestrial connection is defined as a fixed connection, and not service provided by mobile or satellite carriers. Applications may propose to complete the project with any technology capable of supporting the service levels described in Section I.C.i. of the Round 4 Application.

Unique project area means the proposed project area is a different set of census blocks for each submission. An applicant cannot submit the same project area multiple times.

Determination of ten-day service deployment will be based on the definition recently passed in Indiana Legislation. Service is defined as being available if the provider does, or could, within ten days, without an extraordinary commitment of resources or construction charges or fees exceeding an ordinary service activation fee, provide 100/20 broadband Internet at the location.

OCRA follows procedures that surveys must be statistically significant at the 95% confidence level and confidence interval of five. Applicant may utilize the Sample Size Calculator that OCRA recommends when entities are unsure of what their sample size should be for a proposed project area. In order to overturn a validly challenged service address, there must be associated survey data from that address.

The last mile refers to network infrastructure that carries signals from the network to and from the home or business. Depending on network design and density of the area served, the actual distance of the last mile can be relatively short or may be considerably longer than a mile. Middle mile refers to the portion of the telecommunications network that connects a network operator’s core network to the local network (last mile) plant. Middle-mile facilities provide fast, large capacity connections and can range from a few miles to a few hundred miles.

OCRA will determine the final decision on differing speed test results on a case-by-case basis. OCRA reserves the right to ask for additional information including requiring conversations with the providers and residents, a professional engineer’s certificate for the number of addresses in different passing types, or the committed upload and download speed claimed to be served for each project.

No, projects will not be required to pay prevailing wages. However, funded projects will be required to report on whether prevailing wages were paid in order to meet the ARPA requirements. Reporting requirements will be shared with funded projects.

Yes, applications received as part of the new competitive applications, including scope of work and budgets, will be published.

As defined by Indiana Code, minimum broadband internet means a terrestrial connection to the Internet that provides reliable actual speeds of at least one hundred (100) megabits per second downstream and at least twenty (20) megabits per second upstream, regardless of the technology or medium used to provide the connection. Any Indiana address not receiving reliable broadband internet meeting these criteria will be eligible for inclusion in the program.

As defined by Indiana Code, broadband Internet means connection to the Internet that provides reliable actual speeds of at least fifty (50) megabits per second downstream and at least five (5) megabits per second upstream, regardless of the technology or medium used to provide the connection for households and businesses.

OCRA will not discriminate between different types of technology used to provide qualified broadband service in connection with proposed qualified broadband projects.