2-in-5 silver lining

The 2-in-5 rule is an ill wind, but it has blown a little bit of good. The rule used to be "applicants should have reasonable plans to use all of the network drops within two years of installation." (I found that in some old training materials.) I guess that someone at USAC noticed that Catch-22 that applicants were in: you need to make all Internal Connections purchases on a 3-year cycle, but you can only purchase cabling if you'll use it in the next 2 years.

So now the rule is that applicants must be able to show that "sufficient resources are on hand, or planned and budgeted over the next few years." [Emphasis added.] I generally don't like it when the rules get more vague, but since 2 years was too short (I usually advise people to look at least 5 years out when deciding how many network drops to pull), it's an improvement in this case.

So at least the 2-in-5 rule has done one small good thing. But it's still got to go.