Well, it happened. The FCC approved the E-Rate bidding portal. As with so many "improvements" to the program, it will make life more difficult for applicants and service providers, which will drive them into the waiting arms of the consultant community. Really, this is good for my business.
But it's bad for the program, so I don't like it.
And here's the ugly: the FCC decided that the bidding portal should be ready for FY 2028-2029, which means it goes live July 2027. That leaves USAC just over a year to scope the project, find a vendor, develop the portal and get to a final version. I think the only hope is for USAC to find an existing bidding portal that can be modified to meet our needs and somehow kludge it together with EPC. Oh, it's going to be ugly.
Oh wait, there it is in footnote 67: "In the event that the competitive bidding portal is unavailable for use by funding year 2028, applicants will be required to submit their bids and competitive bidding documentation directly to USAC, and we direct the Bureau and USAC to provide guidance to program participants in advance of the beginning of the funding year 2028 procurement period regarding submission of the documentation." So USAC can develop the document repository first, since that's the easy part, and develop the portal with it's system for receiving bids, only letting 3 users see them and logging every time they look at them, and the communications system, where potential bidders can ask questions anonymously and the Q&A is published for all to see. Those seem like the much tougher parts of the project.
