By Bill Toland

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Many of America's rural and urban pockets are a step closer to high-speed Internet access, now that the federal agencies responsible for doling out $7.2 billion in broadband grants have issued the rules that will govern the application process.

The broadband grants are part of the larger the $787 billion federal stimulus package. Vice President Joe Biden, visiting Erie County this week, said the grants would help build new networks in areas that have been neglected by the large telecommunications companies.

"Today's announcement is a first step toward realizing President Obama's vision of a nationwide 21st-century communications infrastructure -- one that encourages economic growth, enhances America's global competitiveness and helps address many of America's most pressing challenges," Mr. Biden said.

About $4 billion of the $7.2 billion total is up for grabs during the first round of the Broadband USA project; applicants may submit their project specs from July 14 to Aug. 1, according to the 121-page notice of funds availability.

The U.S. Rural Utilities Service and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration will be the agencies that vet the proposals. The first $4 billion is supposed to go to "shovel-ready" projects that will be completed by 2010.

"The good news out of all of the rules [is] people need to have been planning this network for quite a while in order to apply for this money," said Craig Settles, president of technology consulting firm Successful.com. "They're really demanding that people have their act together."

The second round of money will go to more ambitious, far-off projects.

The guidelines also require that the would-be network builders abide by the rules of "net neutrality," which means that the networks couldn't choke high-bandwidth applications (large file transfers, movie downloads) in favor of lower-bandwith users.

Because larger telecoms such as Verizon and Comcast already use such throttling techniques to free up space on their networks, they may not want to apply for the grants. Instead, expect smaller telecoms, or cities and townships with designs on in-house networks, to apply for the bulk of the money.

The federal notice sets a low bar when it comes to what constitutes high-speed "broadband" -- an unserved area is defined as a "a proposed funded service area where at least 90 percent of households lack access to [broadband service at] the minimum broadband transmission speed of 768 kilobits per second downstream and 200 kilobits per second upstream."

That's much slower than the high-speed networks that many consumers are used to. In Pittsburgh, for example, Verizon and Comcast offer download speeds of 50 megabits per second, which is more than 60 times faster than the 768 Kbps speed.