Windstream gets $28.7M to expand rural Iowa broadband

The federal government will provide about $28.7 million for Windstream Communications to expand its Internet service in rural Iowa.

The Federal Communications Commission announced the funding Wednesday.

Funding comes from the FCC’s Connect America Fund and will help Windstream expand its service in areas “where the cost of broadband deployment might otherwise be prohibitive,” the FCC said in a statement.

With the funding, Windstream will build out its network to provide Internet speeds of at least 10 megabit per second downloads and 1 megabit per second uploads, the FCC said.

That service would be available to about 44,930 homes and businesses in rural parts of the state.

The speeds are in line with the national average, but lower than the new benchmark for Internet speeds the FCC put in place earlier this year. In January, the FCC redefined high-speed broadband as service with speeds of 25 megabit per second downloads and 3 megabit per second uploads.

The funding includes about $1.2 million each for Windstream operations in Harrison County and Tama County and about $1.1 million in Lee County.

About $337,000 is available for Polk County.

In June, Frontier Communications accepted about $4.2 million to expand Internet service in rural Iowa from the same FCC program.

The Connect America Fund is meant to help provide financial support for telecommunications companies to expand Internet service in rural parts of the U.S.

Companies that receive money from the program have to build out broadband to 40 percent of funded areas by the end of 2017. Full build out must be complete by the end of 2020, according to the FCC.

About 73 percent of Iowa households have access to Internet speeds of 25 down/3 up, according to a Connect Iowa report.

Even so, those households are highly concentrated. Only 8.8 percent of Iowa’s geography has access to the same 25 down/3 up speeds, according to the report.