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The Honorable Tom Wheeler 
Chairman 
lilla,bington. me 20515 
March 4, 2015 
Federal Communications Commission 
445 121h Street, SW 
Washington DC 20554 
Dear Chairman Wheeler: 
We write supporting the original proposal by Rural Broadband Services Corporation Inc. 
(RBSC) for a grant from the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Broadband 
Experiments proposal to support high speed broadband service in rural Oklahoma and in support 
of their February 18, 2015 Application for Review of the Commission's denial for a request for a 
waiver of the requirement to submit three years of audited financials related to their proposal. 
Access to digital resources is important to communities-and the gap between Americans who 
have access to telecommunications and information technologies and those who do not, is more 
tangible and most deeply felt by Americans in rural areas and on Tribal Lands. The proposal 
submitted by RBSC would extend modern digital networks into rural, high-cost areas through a 
fiber cable infrastructure, providing affordable Gigabit broadband service to many large users, 
including the Cherokee Nation and other "anchor institutions" such as schools and universities, 
libraries, hospitals and health care clinics throughout the planned service area in Northeastern 
Oklahoma. 
The Commission prioritized funding for RBSC's proposal, recognizing its cost-competitive 
proposal would improve the economic vitality of Oklahoma's rural and Tribal areas and enhance 
the quality of life for those impacted, while supporting the national goal of enhancing 
telemedicine and distance learning within rural America. However, on January 30, RBSC was 
one of fifteen entities unilaterally removed from further consideration when the Commission 
refused to evaluate the entities' individual financial qualifications because such an evaluation 
would be "resource intensive" and require a "protracted effort"-despite previous 
communications indicating the Commission would consider such issues on a case-by-case basis. 
The decision to unilaterally reject any entity without three years of audited financials strikes us 
as capricious, especially in the case of RBSC, which as a start-up entity that, by definition, would 
not have three years of financial history to audit, willingly provided supplemental documentation 
providing concrete evidence of their ability to fulfill their responsibilities. Reviewing such 
documentation is the responsible course of action, especially when the Commission is acting as a 
steward of limited resources being distributed in a competitive process and has already 
recognized RBSC for having a cost-competitive proposal. 
We urge the Commission to, upon review of RBSC's February 18, 2015 Application for Review, 
grant RBSC's waiver request and actually review the supplemental financial documentation they 
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have already provided to the Commission. We appreciate your thoughtful consideration of our 
request and of RBSC's original proposal to bring high speed broadband service to rural and 
Tribal Oklahoma. 
~~~~ 
James M. Inhofe 
United States Senator 
er of Congress 
Sincerely, 
Tom Cole 
Member of Congress 
Member of Congress