Joe Hrdlicka knows the National Broadband Plan has good intentions.

It’s the unintended consequences he’s worried about.

Hrdlicka, an information specialist with the Iowa Telecommunications Association (ITA), recently filed a joint comment to the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) along with Sheila Navis of the Rural Iowa Independent Telephone Association (RIITA). His fear is that the plan will hurt the 145 rural telephone and Internet companies that the ITA and RIITA represent.

“We believe that the intent of the National Broadband Plan is certainly positive,” Hrdlicka said. “However, the plan needs to better address the needs of rural telecommunication providers and customers.”

The National Broadband Plan was drafted earlier this year by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and is intended to lay out a vision to make broadband technologies more readily available to everyone.

Hrdlicka and the ITA are concerned about two things.

The plan calls for Universal Service Fund (USF) and intercarrier compensation fees, which account for 70 percent of ITA and RIITA members’ revenues, to be redirected into a Connect America fund that would be redistributed. It’s unclear where the money will go.

“What we interpret that to mean is that the urban areas will benefit much more, in a grayer way, than the rural areas,” Hrdlicka said.

The other concern is that the plan articulates rural areas having a need for four megabits per second of broadband speed, while also laying out a strategy for delivering 100 megabits per second to 100 million homes by 2020.

Again, the ITA and RIITA interpret that as meaning urban areas will benefit.

“There’s a great disparity there,” Hrdlicka said. “How do you reach 100 million homes the fastest? That’s our concern.”

Currently, the ITA boasts that 99.37 percent of Iowans have access to fixed or mobile broadband service, according to data from Connect Iowa, a nonprofit organization that tracks broadband coverage in the state.

The fear is that the plan will create a rural-urban divide, which Hrdlicka stresses does not currently exist for Iowa companies.

The ITA has two members in the Des Moines area, Iowa Network Services and HickoryTech. Hrdlicka said the association is acting as though this is a statewide issue. It’s unclear whether Des Moines would be affected.

“It could be, and it could not be,” he said. “We’re operating as though this could be a statewide impact from this issue, because Iowa is naturally regarded as a small state.”

Krista Tanner, board member on the IUB and chair of the Iowa Broadband Deployment Governance Board, said the IUB received comments from 13 organizations after opening a notice of inquiry to seek comment from broadband carriers in Iowa about the national plan.

The IUB will review the comments and decide whether it needs to comment at the federal level about the issue.

So far, Tanner said, the board hasn’t gotten a chance to look too deep into the filed comments. She did note that the ITA and RIITA position differed from those expressed by other carriers, which did not rely on subsidies.

It’s too early to tell exactly what the national plan’s implications are, but Tanner said she understood the ITA’s concerns.

“Their members rely heavily on explicit and implicit support mechanisms. And the FCC has said they are going to review those,” Tanner said. “To the extent that there’s a possibility that those revenue streams could go down, I understand why they’re concerned.”