Wave upon wave

Another new record for this year!  Today's USAC News Brief says, "USAC will release FY2012 Wave 2 Funding Commitment Decision Letters (FCDLs) July 11."  So Wave 2 is coming out 1 day after Wave 1.  I don't think I've ever seen back-to-back waves.

This announcement makes me feel better about one of my gripes concerning the FCC's announcement of Wave 1.  See, by announcing on June 28th what would be in Wave 1, the FCC ensured that none of the applications which cleared PIA between June 28th and July 10th will get an FCDL until the second wave of funding, since the amount of the first wave was fixed in the announcement.  So some applicants are actually going to get a later FCDL, just so the FCC could try to save face by announcing future funding commitments before the start of the funding year.  The back-to-back waves all but solve the problem by making the delay only 1 day.

I originally held myself back from commenting on the FCC's announcement, but today I'm feeling the snark.

First, the tone is a crack-up: "USAC releases...Record Commitment of $646 million."  The whole thing reads like a glorious success, when in fact, it's a miserable failure.  The headline should read: "USAC fails to release any commitments by the start of the funding year."  Instead of "More applicants will receive funding commitment decisions in this wave than any other wave in the program history," it should say, "Never in program history have applicants waited so long to receive funding commitments."  And they even make the $5.24 billion in requests for 2012-2013 seem like a sign of a successful program, instead of the beginning of a long, slow, ugly funding shortage train wreck.  George Orwell could not have written it better.

Second, the tense needs to be corrected in the headline.  See, July 10th (or 11th) is in the future.  So the press release should have started with "USAC Will Release...."  They got the tense right in the rest of the release.

By the way, there was one interesting piece of information in the letter: just over half of applications are in the first wave.  The press release says that "USAC will send over 23,800 letters" and that 46,838 applications were received.  So the first wave will fund half the applications, but commit less than a quarter of the funding for the year.  Looks like it's a good year to be a small applicant.