All right, hello and welcome to today's webinar on E-Rate, What's New for 2019? I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I am also the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries in Nebraska. So I handle all of the, in addition to many things I do here at the commission, are related to today's training. I handle a training consultation, hand-holding, whatever any of our public libraries need to get through the E-Rate process. We do have both schools and public libraries that do E-Rate, and I handle the support for the public libraries. We have someone at the Nebraska Department of Education who handles the support for all of our schools. So today's session will be a very public library focused. Most things schools and libraries do very similarly, but there are some things that are just for one side or the other, and you will hear me mostly today this afternoon talking about public libraries. If you do have any questions throughout the session, please do type into your questions section. I am looking over here. I can monitor that on my computer, so if you have anything you want to know more about, anything you're confused about, pop a question in there for me. So let's get started. There we go. So what is E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that was created out of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The FCC came up with this act that said that there was lots of schools and libraries and other institutions were having trouble affording their internet, their telephone costs, and they said that we need to provide affordable telecommunications access to all of those entities, schools and libraries, healthcare facilities, anything like that. The act was in 1996, and the first year you could apply for an E-Rate discount, get a discount on your telecommunication services was in 1997, and the first year that anyone received the monies was in 1998. It is funded through the monies for this, comes from the universal service fee. This is a tax fee that is on all of our bills for telephone, internet. We pay it as users of the service, both personally and at our libraries, and service providers pay this fee as well onto their bills. All this money is put into a big pot of money, and then as schools and libraries apply for the discounts, it is then divvied up among them. So the FCC is in charge of the program. They set the rules of the program. They created this company, a not-for-profit company, to actually do the day-to-day work of administering the program. It's called the Universal Service Administrative Company. It is acronym is USAC. So during this session, you're probably hearing mostly we're hard to USAC doing different things. That's who you communicate with, and that communicates with you about the E-Rate. In USAC, there's specifically the schools and libraries division that helps work on the funding for schools, K-12 schools, and public libraries in the country. There are also three other programs that USAC does work on to give discounts. There's the healthcare program, which is discounts to healthcare facilities. There's a high cost for areas of the country that might have a really expensive internet like up in Alaska, and low income for low income people. So they've got lots of different ways that they get discounts to get internet access to discounts and access to people with one we're concerned with, because we're in public libraries, is the schools and libraries division. Now, the FCC sets the rules and policies for the whole program. They say how things could be done, needs to be done. And then USAC figures out how they're going to make this happen, how they're going to tweak a rule, update a web page, change a form, whatever they need to do to make what the FCC wants to happen, happen. Over the years of the program, there have been a few of these major updates. Every year, things change a little bit, but there's only been about five or six times where things have done such a major change that it was a huge overhaul of the system. And the most recent one was in 2014, when there was the e-rate modernization report and order. There was two different sections to it released in 2014. This is these were instructions from the FCC telling USAC, here's what we want you to do to change things and make it the program easier. They wanted it streamlined, make it simpler for the libraries to apply, everything to be online, no more paper forms, which I know is a huge plus for everybody. A lot of these paper forms going back and forth is a much of a hardship. And so they put out these orders, this report and orders. And since 2014, lots of changes have been happening up until then. It was pretty, pretty stagnant. This program did what it did, but in 2014, huge changes were dictated. And then a lot of things have happened since then. We are at a new-ish version of the online system to do e-rate right now. What we think we're going to be with for a while. They've been working on it for a couple of years, seems to be working. And that's what we're going to look at today. Now, some of the basics of e-rate, who can apply? Libraries and library systems, schools and school districts in the state.  In the instructions for e-rate, it states that in order to be eligible for a library, you must be eligible to receive LSTA funds. This is library, service and technology act funds, monies that comes from that. Each state in the country does decide what this means differently. It is given to the state library agency, which here in Nebraska is us, the Nebraska Library Commission to decide what this means. What does it mean to be eligible for LSTA funds? In Nebraska, we provide services here through the Library Commission, our Nebraska Access Databases, some of our other programs. And we use LSTA funds to pay for them. And then they are made available to all you guys to use for free. So we take that as the trickle down that you are receiving LSTA funding by using those services, and that means that all public libraries in Nebraska are eligible. Now, if you talk to some of your colleagues in other states, you may get a different answer from them at what means to be eligible because, as I said, each state decides themselves what this means. The FCC has lifted up to the states to determine that they have not dictated beyond saying eligible for LSTA funding. I know in some other states, they say you must be an accredited public library to apply, or some might have some other roles. You must have submitted some sort of a survey or form or something. Here in Nebraska, all public libraries are good. Now, the e-rate funding year, e-rate commitments, monies are given away during a year process, and the funding year runs from July 1st of any year to June 30th of the next year. So right now, you may be in the fall of a year, you're starting your request process and you're looking to the future. Right now, you're submitting forms to start receiving funding starting next July 1st, July 1st, 2019. And that will be for the year starting July 1st, 2019 and going through June 30th, 2020. So e-rate is an annual thing. You have to do this. This isn't a one time thing where you apply once and you have it forever. Every year you have to reapply to make sure you get it for the next funding year. There is officially $3.99 billion available in the program. I don't know why they don't just round it up to $4 billion, but that's the official wording. But it is adjusted annually for inflation. So if they need more monies, they'll be more, less, less. If there is extra money from a previous year that has not been used, has not been distributed out to any libraries, they can roll it over into the next year if they need it to complete any of the requests. So how much of a discount can you get? Now, in previous years, you needed to know this and enter into your forms when you were applying for e-rate. Now it is automatically fed into there from the system based on information that comes from to them. But I do tell libraries, if you want to know ahead of time what you might be getting or just to confirm, you can calculate what your discount would be and also just so you know how the program works. So you can get anywhere from 20 to 90 percent off of your eligible costs and we'll get into what is eligible in a few slides. And for a library, this depends on the percentage of kids that are in the school lunch program. This is the free and reduced school lunch program in the school district in which your library is located. So you may serve children or people from multiple school districts just because of where you are located. But what you need to do for e-rate purposes to determine what their discount is, you look at where geographically your library sits and what school district it's in. And you look at the numbers for that school lunch program for that district. The FCC want needed some way of determining who should get more, who might be a needier area in the country. And there are lots of ways you can determine poverty levels. And they just chose this one, the National School Lunch Program, as their way of doing it. You cannot include pre-K numbers and that's OK. We have a way of looking it up so you don't have that. So first you figure out the number of students that are eligible for the program. And that's actually very important to a number of kids that are eligible, not the number of students that actually apply. There may be some families that do not need to apply, even though they may be eligible, they don't want to. They're afraid of the stigma on their children for being in the program. There's various reasons why they don't. But that's not what we're looking at. Not the ones who actually are getting it, but how many are actually eligible. Once you have that number, you then combine that whether you are considered urban or rural based on U.S. census data. Now, where do we get all these numbers? Luckily, we have all this information available online to us here in Nebraska. The Department of Education, the Nebraska Department of Education posts on their website every year their school lunch data. So you can go to their website, the URLs there. And we also have a quick link off of our web page to that. And you can go there and you can look up a spreadsheet of right now they've got the 2018-19 numbers up there. And it has multiple tabs in the spreadsheet. One is each of the schools listed individually, but they have a tab that is also the school district as a whole. So you don't have to figure out who are all the schools in your district and do the math, just go to the district one and it will have there. I'll tell you how many children are enrolled, how many are eligible for the school lunch program and what that percentage is. Then on the USAC website, they have a urban rural status lookup tool that you can see based on US census data what you are considered. Of course, here in Nebraska, most of our area is rural, so which is good for us because rural does can get a higher discount. This is based right now in the 2010 census data. That's the most recent complete census that we have. So that's what they use. And the FCC cut off between being urban and rural is 25,000 population. So anything equal or greater than 25,000 is urban. And beneath below that would be rural. And you can see that most areas in Nebraska are going to be rural. Places like Lincoln and Omaha are going to be urban. And then you use a matrix to figure out what your discount is. And here is the matrix, just a chart, a table that USAC puts out. You figure out the pull, the percent of students eligible for the school lunch program from the spreadsheet from the Department of Education and then describe whether you're urban or rural. And there's two categories of services that we're going to go into category one and category two, different types of things you can get an e-rate discount on. And you can see from this spreadsheet or this table here that even with less than 50 percent of the students in your school district being eligible, you can still get 60 to 70 percent off on your bills. This would be your internet services, any of your equipment related to internet, anything related to that. So it's a pretty, pretty large chunk that you can get here in Nebraska. Most of our libraries do fall between the 60, 70 and 80 percent discounts. We have a couple that do hit that 90, they're much higher. And then a few that are even lower than that, that still do go through the process because you know, still getting, you know, 40, 50 percent, 40, 30 percent off on your bill is still a good deal. All right. So what is eligible or what is e-rateable? I don't know if that's a word. I found out I borrowed that from a colleague's training that they did. The e-rateable, the FCC publishes what they call the eligible services list every year. So each year there's a new list of all the things that you can get an e-rate discount on. So you do need to make sure you're looking at the right list, depending on what year you are applying for. So you don't look at an old list. They post them on their website and there's a link to that. There is a new list for 2019 and there's all the previous lists or there's fail as well. So if you wanted to see what had been eligible previously, you could always go back and look what this is important about, which year you're looking at, because sometimes you are working with multiple years at a time when you're working on your e-rate. Right now in the way the process works, you're starting applying for 2019, but you're still wrapping up the process for 2018. So you will be working on multiple years at the same time. And if you do need to refer to this list, you need to make sure you're looking at the right one. So they keep them all up on their website there. Now, this is one of the things that had a major overhaul of it done based on that modernization order that the FCC put out. Before the modernization order, which was in 2014, the eligible services list was almost 50 pages long. It was huge. It was unwieldy. It was, here's a list of things that are eligible. Here's the things that aren't eligible. Here's an appendix of different things, some definitions, detailed things. It was just got really almost impossible to use. It was something you had to use online only and try and search through it to find what you might be looking for. One of the things they wanted is they wanted this streamlined. The FCC said get it down to just the bare necessities of what is needed. So as of 2016, it's only eight pages long, the content of what you can actually be eligible for. So much easier, so much simpler. It's basically if it's in this list, it's what's eligible. If it's not, don't ask. The previous eligible services list did get that big because every time, for various reasons, they kept adding new things, new services, detailing what they all were, explaining new things that came up over time. They do pay attention to technology and how things are changing and new ways of obtaining telecommunications and internet services. But also every time someone asked, well, what about this? And what about that? And how about this? And every time they even had to say, no, no, that's not eligible. No, that isn't. But this is adding and adding to it. So they finally said, make it simpler. So it's just here's what's eligible. The list is divided into, as I mentioned before, two categories. Category one is services getting your internet, your high speed connectivity to your building. Category two is, once it's at your building, getting it to all the devices in your building. So you can think of it as the difference between what would be under the category two when you're making requests and getting your discounts. What would be category one is the walls of your building. So you are basic getting your paying for your monthly internet and getting it to your building. Any construction or installations you need to done of cabling or wiring, getting something to your building, that would be category one. Once it's at the building, then you're going to have wires and cables and servers and routers and all those things that allow all of your devices, your computers, your tablets, your phones to use the internet. That's all your category two. Any questions so far? You can type in the question section if you have anything you want to know more about or anything you're not sure of. So category one, the getting the internet to your library. This is any kind of connection that will get high speed, broadband internet to your building is eligible. So cable modems, DSL, lit and dark fiber, satellite, wireless, this is not an exhaustive list I have here. This is just some of the most common ones. Anything you can use to get the internet to your building is eligible under category one. Now specifically talking about fiber, because this is something a relatively new type of service, there is a lit fiber and dark fiber. Lit fiber is where it's available. You can contact a service provider and switch to it.  Now dark fiber is similar to, it's the same thing as lit fiber, but it hasn't been turned on yet. When they laid in those fiber lines, dug the trenches and put fiber throughout your town and brought it in, they put in more connections they needed at the time. They were hoping, and they were correct, that there was gonna be more demand in the future and they wanted to have to do this major construction of digging your trench, laying all the fiber lines only once, so they put in more than was necessary. So some of it's turned on and being used already, that's something you could use, but there may be other fiber down there that has not been turned on yet and it's just waiting for somebody to want to use it for them to turn on. That is something that you can apply and get a discount, an e-rate discount on. There may be a cost to have it lit and turned on, that would be eligible. And then of course to then continue using it monthly once it is turned on. In the e-rate process, they do recommend if you're interested in receiving a discount on fiber that you don't just apply for the lit because I'm thinking, well that's what's available because I know apply as you can see here is a combination of least dark and least lit fiber together because you never know what's out there. You might not be aware of if something, if extra dark fiber was run in your town. And if you put this on there, say this is what you want to discount on, a service provider could contact you and say, hey, we actually do have some of those lines and they're like only up to a block from your library. Let's finish the connection and get you set up and you can have the super fast fiber now. Another way of getting fiber is a self-provision network. This is something else that E-rate does mention so that you know that it's available to get a discount on. This is where you actually own the network yourself. You're not connecting to another company. You hire someone to construct the network and you actually own and maintain part of that. Now this would be something more for a large school district or a large library district would possibly do this. And not many of our individual libraries out there would not necessarily be involved in this, but it does come up on the forums and you'll see it. So I do explain it in case that is your situation. Now in addition to the services itself, there may be construction needed to get the service to you in the first place. If this is something new, you're starting up or you're switching from one service to another. Any special in category one, it's called special construction. Anything that you need to have done extra beyond just saying, hey, giving my internet, you can apply for a discount on. This would be related to your lit, your dark fiber, self-provisioned networks. So any construction needed, any project management, if you have a company you have to work with, any design, anything that needs to be done related to it to get that connection to your building, you can apply for a discount on under category one as well. Now, special construction, you might not be able to fall into your nice neat E-rate funding year. And USEC understands that, the FCC understands that, that you might not be able to get your service provider to only do your work, your construction between July of one year and June of the next year. So if necessary, you can actually begin that work up to six months before the start of the funding year. So January of a year for the upcoming, the following funding year, if necessary. So you can work with your service provider to figure out when they'll be able to come and do your fiber connection or whatever you need to have done. And even if it's any time before that July 1st, going back to January of the same year, you're good and you're still get your discount on it. Of course, you've got to follow through and use that service in the end. But just so you know, you don't have to force your provider to just stick to that July 1st to June 30th timeframe. Now there's one other thing that is related to category one services that we need to talk about here. And that is voice services. Voice services that your telephone connections. This is something that has been phased out of the e-rate program. It was, as you saw at the very beginning, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Waybeck then said for telecommunications and internet access. But as part of the modernization order in 2014, the FCC wanted to really focus on closing that wifi gap. As we all know, internet across the rural areas and across the urban areas, many areas in the country is not that great. It needs to be faster. The many locations need better and faster, stronger connections. And the FCC wanted e-rate to help libraries get there. The only in the past, this was difficult because there was not enough money in the e-rate program to provide all the support for telephone requests, all the support for your basic monthly internet and then the extra support for libraries who wanted to connect to something new and faster. So they made the decision that we will phase out the telephone support. We're gonna focus on internet. We're just gonna make the e-rate an internet-only program. This is working so far. As of the 2016 year, I believe there's enough money to fund all applications that were submitted, it's correctly submitted. In the past, there were times, there most years you would hear about how for category two services, that's the connections inside your library, getting everything hooked up, that only libraries at a certain discount level would receive it, only the highest discount level, 80, 85, 90% discount would even get that funding because there just wasn't enough money for all of them. And they would go to the highest discount level because it's the most, the neediest areas of the country. But now that they have phased out providing support to voice services, they were able to fund everything. This was a big point of contention. Large school districts, large library districts did comment back to the FCC on their, suggest their order for this, saying that this was a hardship on them, that telephone service is a necessity for them. It's an essential service and they need the discount on it or they're going to have to cut their budget elsewhere. FCC's determined answer to that is, well, you'll pay full and phone, but we're going to give you these great discounts on now faster internet, so you'll make it up there. Whether that's happening or it's going to happen is yet to be seen. I do know that there's a lot fewer libraries applying for e-rate in general. Here in Nebraska, for example, up until they did this phase down of the voice services, we usually had 112, 120 libraries would apply. Now we have about 60, so almost half of our libraries are no longer applying because they only asked for discounts on their telephone. So, but something to be aware of because it has just been phased out completely and the way they did this was they gradually reduced the support for telephone services.  So they gradually reduced it 20 discount points per year until it was down to zero for everyone. So for example, if you were at the 80% or six discount level, starting with 2015, you would only, your calculation made it 80%, you'd only get 60% off on your phone, then 40, 20 and down to zero last year. And you can see from here, 2018 was the last year that anybody could get any sort of phone discount and that was people at the 90% discount level during the calculation, they'd still get that 10%. And we did have about three libraries here in Nebraska who still did it, you know, get your last bit out of it. But as of this year, 2019, that you're all gonna be applying for, there's no longer any rate money for discounts on telephone services. And that means anything that gets you a voice connection, a voice circuit. So voice over IP, local long distance, satellite, wireless, cell phones, anything that is, now that you can get wireless and satellite internet access, and that's fine, internet services. But if those connections are giving you voice service, that's the key. E-rate thinks about what is the service you're receiving using this piece of equipment? And that's what they look at to determine whether you should or shouldn't be getting a discount on it or not. So it's getting you a voice. It is no longer eligible as of funding year 2019. Now, on to category two services. This is, as you remember, everything within the building. The equipment and the service that you might need to get broadband throughout your building and so that all the devices that you might be using the internet for can get to it. This is what we call our internal connections, managed internal broadband services and basic maintenance, tech support and service of those internal connections. Category two funding works different from category one. Category one is you have a bill, you pay it and you get your percentage off of whatever that bill is. Category two, they did this pilot project to test a new way of distributing the funding, a five-year budget, so a five-year period of time and some money that give you to use over that five years. And I'll explain exactly how that works in just a second here. First, we'll talk about what is category two eligible? Basically any piece of equipment that you might need to make the internet work inside your building. So your wireless access points, cables, network switches, firewalls, routers, power supplies, wireless LAN controllers and any sort of upgrades or software that is necessary to run your network. So network software will be eligible. Something like Microsoft Word would not, of course, be eligible, that software on your computer but has nothing to do with making your internet work. Databases that you use on the internet, those are not eligible as well either.  You're thinking here about software and programs that make the internet work within your building. Something new that is a new way of receiving internet is called managed wifi or as E-rate calls it, managed internal broadband services. You can receive your internet from a third party, someone else who completely operates and manages and keeps up with your internet. You don't need to have an IT person or you don't need to pay attention to what's working or what's not, you just hire out to this company and they run it all for you.   So this is something to look into, see if there's any companies in your area that might be doing this and you could totally hand over to them making all your internet work. Now, basic maintenance of these connections is also a category two service. So any repair and upkeep, if you need to update your wiring if there's something damaged in your building and needs to be repaired, basic tech support, updating your software, configuration of your software all of that kind of work that needs to be done is also eligible. Now, what is specifically eligible is actual work performed under a contract or an agreement with whoever does this. It could be a separate company, some person you know in town who does this, it could be your internet service provider. But if, and what they mean by actual work performed why they specify this is you may pay someone a monthly fee to be on call for you. So $20 a month, you're our tech support but you don't need them to come and do something every month necessarily. It's not until the third or fourth month that the squirrel chews through the cables in your wall of your building and you need to have it repaired. When they come to do that actual job, the cost of that job and that work is eligible but the $20 a month you pay just to have them on call that is not. So it's the actual work being performed is what you would get a discount on. And then there's a few miscellaneous things that could be either category one or two. All the taxes and fees and surcharges that you pay on these costs are also eligible. So when you are asking for e-rate, you actually tell them, you tell you sec, it's gonna cost me this much. You don't wanna tell them just the cost of the internet like it cost me $20 a month for my internet. You wanna add in whatever those taxes and fees are too so you get a discount on all of it. For any equipment you get, if there's fees or shipping or anything related to that, you can get a discount on the installation of that equipment even if it's a third party not your service provider doing it but you have some other one person in town and you have come in and do this kind of work for you that can all get a discount on and training. Training related to running your network not training for your staff on how to use the internet or how to use Microsoft Word but training for someone so that they know how to run your internet connections and your internet network within the building that kind of training you could also get a discount on. Now, as I've worked with libraries on their e-rate applications over the past few years I've been actually doing this here at the library commission being the e-rate coordinator since 2009. Lots, I get many, many questions from libraries who don't know what their connections are what kind of internet connection they have. Do they have DSL or cable modem or whatever and that's very understandable that it may be something that you're not sure about but there's a new thing of that IMLS Institute of Museum and Library Services has come out with that can help libraries figure out what their internet and the broadband is like in their building. It's called the Tord Gigabit Libraries Toolkit and it's specifically designed for our small and rural libraries and as you see here mentioned tribal as well who don't have their own IT people.  You're the only person who even pays attention to what's going on and keeps track of it and is in charge of knowing these things and it's sometimes hard to keep up with. This is a free website that you go to and I've got the URL down there at the bottom. It's also available linked on our webpage. And what there is is there is a document that you go into and it's this long document with questions that asks you guided questions for you to go around and explore your network. Where is certain connections? What kind of a firewall do you have? What is the technology that you have? And you answer all these questions and by the end, once you've filled out all this documentation you've figured out everything you have in your building and you've learned how they all connect. It will ask you, well, what do you have? Do you have this, this and this? Okay, then they connect this way and this is what your sick connection is. So it makes you go out and find all this out and then create a document for yourself, a little guide of here's my broadband in my building. There's a technology inventory part of it. Go and see how many routers do we have? Where are the servers? What is the network that we have? What cables do we have and where are they? What staff do you have to support it? Your broadband services and operational support. Do you have a tech person who's the contact at your internet provider? Who's your go-to person? Is it someone on your staff? Note that down. They even have a section for funding opportunities, other ways to help get monies to pay for your internet. So once you've got that document all filled out there's then a separate one, a smaller document, the broadband improvement plan. So you basically take what you learned about what your current situation is with the toolkit and input that into this other document. And it will tell you, well, here's what you can do to improve if you want to go faster or a different kind of internet connection. So that will help you go towards that. So I highly recommend everyone who wants, take a look at this, try it out. It's free, it's online. It's just a Word document that you download and use. There's training and videos about how to use it on there. And it will help you at least even if you don't use it for e-rate, you'll at least know and understand better what's in your library now. What is our technology? And so that you can at least understand and talk about to anybody who might want to know what your situation is. They do promote this though as a tool to use for when you're applying for your e-rate so that you know when I'm filling out my forms and this is the kind of things I need to ask for because this is what we already have. So any questions so far about the categories, what your internet e-rate is, who can apply? Type in your questions section, whatever you have a question. So now category two budgets. I mentioned to you before that category two works differently than category one. Well, the way they set it up for category two was, and this is a pilot project, remember, and that's gonna be very important. They created a five year budget for libraries starting if they want to do with 2015, the first year of the program through 2019, a pot of money that you could use for any of your category two services. Remember, this is everything in, within your building to get your internet. I found it very confusing when I first heard about it because for me, when I think of budget, I think, oh, you're gonna give me money, give me a budget and I spend it. As in exactly what do you rate is doing, what they are doing is they're saying they make up, it's a pretend budget. Here's how much we think you could spend over five years to keep your technology up and we're gonna give you a discount, we're gonna use your discount calculation on that and that's the amount of money we're gonna give you to help support any of those things you might be doing. So it's not actual money they're giving you, it's just, we're gonna do the math and say, you'll spend this much in five years and if your discount is 50%, we'll give you half of that money that you can just, you'll have, you'll give back to you, we'll reimburse you if you use it to do anything over those five years. You don't have to stick to that budget amount for what you need to do, you may have a project that costs $20,000 to put it in a new computer lab and your category two budget might only be 10,000 and that's fine, that's just a category two budget for E-rate, you'll only get a discount on that amount but you can have your project be whatever you need it to be as long as you can cover the cost above whatever E-rate's gonna give you as a discount. Now how do you figure out what your budget is? There is what they call the budget multiplier, a certain number amount that they use and for a library they base it on the size of your building. What is the total area and square feet of your library building? Now the example here we talk about, you're talking about as you can see it says funding year 2018. This is because we don't know yet what the amount's gonna be for 2019. They don't announce that until sometime in the spring of the funding year when you're actually needing to do these actual calculations. So for now we can just, you know, guesstimate on what it might be. It's gone up, it goes up, a recalculated each year based on inflation. It's gone up about a couple of cents each year. So we can guess that probably for 2019 it's gonna be $2.40, maybe $2.41. We have to wait and find out. But for example, if you just at least know what it is it's $2.39 for 2018. But, and you multiply that times whatever is the square feet of your building. And this is all floors of the building not anything within your walls. You probably have a blue brand or some document somewhere that states what your building is. But there's a minimum. There's a minimum amount that they will give as a budget and that's at $9,582.23. If your building size changes for some reason you can recalculate, it will be recalculated every year. Hopefully your building would only get bigger, not smaller.  But if there is a change you would need to report it every year to USAC and then they would do a recalculation and change what your budget is. Now here's a specific example. Your building is 3,500 square feet. You multiply that times $2.39. And you get 8,365. However, they do have this minimum budget that $9,582.23. So that's actually your pre-discount budget as they call it. That's their pretend amount of money. We think over a five year period this is how much your building could you could spend would need to spend. If your discount rate is 50% you'll get half of that in the rate funds. This is just an example used to make it easy to math.  So you're gonna have this amount in your e-rate account $4,792, $91, sorry, in 12 cents that's available to you to use. And you'd use it up a little each year if you want to. You can use it all in one big shot. If you got a big project just say, hey, we're doing a new lab this year. Boom, we're using everything we have and getting it all done. Or each year you can buy a bit of equipment and spread it out, whichever you want to. So anything in category two, as I said is this pretend budget, you just gotta kind of think of it as they think we could spend $9,582. So they're gonna set aside $4,791 for us to get reimbursed from. And what you do each year is you tell them every year what you've bought, what you spent money on and they send you reimbursement checks on those. Now, I did mention that this budget is a pilot project and that right now, this year at this moment is a problem because 2019, the year we're applying for is the last year of this five year budget pilot. As of today, when I checked right before doing this class we don't know what's happening after 2019. The FCC is supposed to submit a report, is supposed to put a report on their category two budget pilot report letting everyone know and evaluating how to go. This was a new way of doing it. Previously, before 2015, category two works just like category one. You buy something, you get your discount on it. Easy, easy, nothing confusing. This was a new way they wanted to try out and do it. So until we know what they come up with was a success, did it do what we wanted it to do? Did libraries understand how to use it? Did it even get used enough when we changed how it was done? We won't know what happens after 2019. Now what we'd previously been saying is no matter when you start your category two budget you didn't have to start it in 2015, the first year. You could have started in 2016, 17, 18, 19. That would be your first year and then you'd have five years out. However, what they've just said this year in training is since we don't know what's going to happen after 2019 we don't know if it's actually gonna keep going after that. Even if you started in 2018, you should have 19, 20, 21, 22, 19, 22, 23. But until the FCC does the report and says, yes, we're letting that continue, we only have a guarantee of knowing what's going on in for funding your 2019. So the recommendation at the moment is plan to use up whatever you can of your category two budget that's available to you in your 2019.  Hopefully soon they will put out their report and we'll then know what's gonna happen. Will it start a whole another five year pilot project or another five year budget? Cause they say it worked. Will they go back to the old way? At the moment, nobody knows. So if you're thinking about category two or you're interested in anything that we mentioned, look into it right now and see if you can use at least as much as possible to at least get your money's worth out of this until we know what the situation is. We have a question here. If you need to e-rate, if you're new to e-rate, can a library apply for a category two budget based on 2019 only? Yes, if you're brand new, you can start your category two with 2019. We just don't know. You're still allowed to do that. Start it as that your first year. We just don't know what will happen beyond 2019. Will it only be 2019? And since this was a pilot project, starting with 2020, it's gonna be something completely different and a different type of money or will they let you continue? We just don't know. So even if you haven't done anything yet, go in, look, see if there's something you can apply for and at least start it. Try and use as much as you can and we'll see what happens. Hopefully the deadline to start applying for 2019, we don't know the exact deadline yet is gonna be sometime in February of next year. So we still have time for FCC to put out this report and for libraries to figure out how to work with it. So they have to have something help by then. But right now we're kind of in a limbo here. So think about it right now if you're gonna do it as using it up in 2019, but do be aware that you do have until February, sometime in February to make your final decision. If you're willing to wait and hold off a little bit and category two until you find out, we find out what the FCC says that might be a way to go with it. All right, a couple of other things to talk about quickly here related to E-rate. Technology planning. Technology plans are no longer required. You may, people have done E-rate before, may remember you had to create a plan about how you're gonna update your technology and submit it in order to do E-rate. Reason I mentioned that was eliminated as of 2015. The reason I mentioned it is you still may see it mentioned on websites and things and on forums because libraries are still having to work with it, but it is no longer required. It is a good idea to have a technology plan though that toward gigabit libraries plan could be one for you. I also have information on our E-rate website about technology planning in general. So that's a quick thing. The other thing that you do need to be aware of is SIPA. SIPA is the Children's Internet Protection Act. And in E-rate, because this is federal funds, you must be in compliance with SIPA to receive an E-rate discount on internet access and internal connections. Now that telephone services have been eliminated from the program and are no longer refunding, that was the one thing you didn't need to be compliant with SIPA for because telephone has nothing to do with internet. In order to participate in E-rate, you do need to be in compliance with SIPA. In compliance with SIPA means that you have a filter, you are filtering the internet services on the computers that you are using. This, that's what the second bullet there is, technology protection measure. That's their big technical word for having a filter. So you need to have some sort of filter, whether it's on your individual computers, whether it's through your service provider at your server level, something that is a filter on every computer in your library that is using the internet service that you are getting an E-rate discount on. Now some people say, well, I just need to worry about the children because that is what this is about in the children's computers. That's not true. E-rate and SIPA says all computers that are being used using the internet service, using whatever it is you're gonna get a discount on have to have a filter on it. What's great about SIPA, some people think that's crazy that I say is great, is it is very vague and not specific. It's only about 12 to 14 pages long, the whole act itself. And if you are concerned about if this is too much filtering on adult computers or staff computers even have to have something installed on them, there is a part of SIPA that stipulates that it must be able to be turned off for any adult. An adult is defined by SIPA as 17 and over who wants to use, you need to use the internet for legal bonafide research and use. So you do need to install the filters that you can turn it off for anybody who asks as an adult. Easy peasy. And that is how you get your E-rate discount. I know that there is a lot of contention about this as well in the library world. Some libraries are, yes, filter, protect the children at all costs. And at the other extreme are libraries who say that we are all about freedom of information. This is censorship, I will never filter anything. And that's fine. However, if you want to receive E-rate funding, you do need to filter in some way. What's great about it though is, as I said, even once you turn it on, you get it all set up, you then turn it off on the computers that are needed for your staff or that your adults request. You also can put it at the lowest level of filtering. Many of our products have low security, medium, high, various things. You can set it at the very lowest level where nobody even notices that it's filtering. And that meets the requirements because it's on there and it's working. So there's information on the USAC website about that. Information on my E-rate webpage about that as well. So you can look more into that if you need to. But as of 2019, because there's no longer any voice services available for discounts in E-rate, anyone complying, anyone who wants to receive an E-rate discount does need to be in compliance with CIPA. All right, any other questions right now up to what we've been talking about? We've talked about category two budgets, what is eligible, who can receive discounts? All right, type in whatever you need to. All right, so now we are going to get into the forms themselves. E-rate is an annual process, as I mentioned, and it is a series of forms that you submit every year in a rotating process. There are four basic forms. Three, everyone submits every year. The fourth one, it depends. So one, two, three, you always go through at least to that third form. Fourth one, and we'll get in the details about that, may, you know, depends. For the first form of the process, you're saying I want to receive a service, I want to receive internet access, I want to buy some routers. Second form of the process, I have picked who I want to be my service provider, I've picked who I want to buy my equipment from and what it's going to cost. Third form is letting you second know I've started receiving the service, I got the equipment, the installation's been done. And in the fourth form, I'm paying my bills, I want my money now. And there's two different forms for that depending on if you get a reimbursement or discount on your bills and we'll get into the details of that. There's one extra form that is not listed in those four basic because it is only a one-time thing. In order to receive reimbursements on your bills, meaning you pay your bill in full and then E-rate sends you the money, they do it now via direct deposit only. It's only through electronic bank transfers and you need to give USAC your banking information. This is very similar to doing direct deposit for your paycheck. So your bank account number, routing number, all that basic information about your bank account, about the library's bank account, not your account. The library's bank account that you want the monies to be reimbursed to. That form you should only have to do once as long as you don't change bank accounts. Once you do that one time, it's then good for all the future years of getting your reimbursements. So there are retention policies about E-rate. You must retain copies about any E-rate paperwork for 10 years. This is also something that was expanded with the E-rate modernization. It was five years, now it's 10. And this is 10 years from the last date of service. Last date is the end of that funding year. So June 30th of whatever year. So for the funding year we're applying for right now, 2019, anything related to that E-rate application you need to keep through June 30th of 2030. It seems like a such a long time now. If there is any contracts you have signed and agreed to before this year that relate to 2019, you'd have to keep those as well through June 30th of 2030. Same thing with any SIPA documentation, anything of that is your invoices, your policies that you've created about it. No matter whenever you did that, no matter when that happened, even it was like eight years ago, that still applies to your 2019 application because that's the proof that you've been filtering and you have something, you keep that as well. You can keep these in either electronic or paper. You do not have to keep piles of paper around, big binders or file cabinets full of all these things. You can scan everything, put it on a hard drive, put it on a flash drive somewhere and have that be your storage of that. As long as you can get to it and send something, whatever they ask for to USAC, that is they're happy that you have it, whatever ways works best for you. This 10-year period is because E-rate, USAC does go back and do what they call audits.  It's not the same kind of audit that the IRS does, it has nothing to do with the IRS. This is an audit that USAC does of their E-rate program and it doesn't, if they come to you and say you've been picked, they randomly pick libraries, it just means that they do checks and balances. They wanna make sure the program's working correctly, everyone understood how to use it, is there anything they can improve? Sometimes there are checks for things that are because something has done wrong, but that's not usually done in audit. This is just a, let's see what's going on with it and they can go back 10 years if they want to. Just to see how things have been going on the past. So make sure you keep everything and everything being any of the forms you submitted, any correspondence back from USAC about your forms, any bids you received, contracts from service providers, invoices, correspondence, decision-making on why you picked a service provider, why you did something, any specific equipment, your receipts and everything related to that. Anything that has to do with that E-rate funding that you applied for, you must keep. So I recommend, as I said, scan, scan, scan everything, put it into a folder on your computer that says 2019 stuff and then just hold on to it for 10 years and then might have a rotating as the next year comes up, you can delete the whole this year. Now this 10-year process only, this 10-year retention policy just came into being with the modernization. So we haven't actually gone 10 years yet since that, so nobody's gonna have 10 years yet and that's okay. You may still just only have five for some because that was the previous and so until we have gone 10 years from when they made this a rule in 2016, you won't actually have 10 years and that's all right because they know from when they actually made the change to their roles but start saving anything and everything. Now, to apply for E-rate is done online now. I did mention briefly earlier about paper forms that we used to have. The FCC, as part of their modernization said, make it online, stop sending paper back and forth through the mail because that's what it was. We sent in a form through the mail. Usag replied back to us through the mail. It took a long time and it was very painful. Now there is the E-rate portal, which is the acronym EPC, but that stands for EPIC. That is how they pronounce that, is the EPIC system. Starting with funding year 2016, all forms, but one, are now in the E-rate Productivity Center EPIC. This is the URL where you can get to it online and what's good about this as far as Usag says, as far as that retention policy of all your forms, they will keep everything in there for you. They have said, we will keep everything for the 10 years that you need to online, all the things that you submit in there for you. I think that's great, that's a great backup. I recommend keeping your own copies to just to play it safe. Everything you do within EPIC, you can print out and save, open up as a PDF and print out and save your own copy for it. Of course, any of the documentation you have on your end, you can save too. So because they've gone through a lot of changes, there's been a very, a multiple incarnations of the online version of doing E-rate. And this is the most recent one. I recommend keeping your own copies just to keep, just to play it safe. It looks like this is what we're gonna be going with. There was a couple of different iterations of trying to get E-rate online that they tested out that didn't work so well. Their interim, this seems to be the one they're going with. As you see, it's been used since 2016 and they are really focused on making this work for us. So the reason that this is a good thing is one place for everything that you do, all program activities. You submit your forms, you certify them. That's your electronic signature, you send them to USAC. They respond to you that they've received your forms of any questions they may have. You can check the status of any of your applications. You could ask them questions, proactively reach out to USAC and say, hey, I need to know something or I'm confused about something. Also a great advantage of this new Epic system is that you can use it from any device. Your computer, a laptop, a tablet, you could even use your phone if you wanted to. I don't recommend submitting, completing and submitting any applications on your phone, but just to log in and check on something, sure. And we'll see what the status is, see if they sent you an answer to your question. Absolutely. And you can use any browser, the browser of your choice. Previous versions of doing e-rate online, not the Epic system you were required to use Internet Explorer. Thankfully, they eliminated that and now with this new version, new system, you can use whatever browser you like, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, anything, most recent version of anything will work in the system. Now, USAC will automatically create an account for any organization who has been participating in e-rate. If you aren't already participating, you can reach, if you're new, brand new, you'll reach out to them and they will create you an account. And they set up an account administrator. The account administrator for current applicants was whoever had submitted the most recent forms and they just automatically chose them. But with this new system now, you can have multiple people have access to working on your forms. You're the main administrator and then you can add other users to the system. And they have different permission levels you can have them be at. So you can decide what they have the access and how much they can do. There's the full user where you can complete a form, file a form, certify, signing off on things, do everything. There's partial where they can get you information into your forms but are not able to submit something. They can't do that final submission. That would be left to the account administrator, the director of the library, whoever you want to be authorized. And there's view only, where you can see all the forms in there but can't do anything to them. So just looking at them. There's also, as you can see here, that any of those can update your basic library info as well, your organization. So to get to the Epic system, when you go to the USAC website, that's URL there, usac.org slash sl. for schools and libraries. There's a blue button in the upper right for Epic. And then also under resources and tools on the left there, the menu down the side, there is a link to the e-rate productivity center. When you click on that, you get a page about Epic. There's some videos for training. So if you want to learn more about how to do certain things in there, they've got a lot of user guides. They've got a lot of videos there and putting out about how to use it. But over here on the right is where you would actually log in. As I said, if you're new, there's a link right here, new users contact us and this will get you where you can reach out to USAC and say, either I'm a brand new library doing e-rate for the first time or I'm a new staff person at an existing e-rate library and I don't have access to the previous director or previous person's info at all and they can set you up with your own account. So each individual, your library has an account and then any individual who works with it has their own personal one. If you do have access, like if you're a new director and you've taken over from a previous person and hopefully they've given you their login info as the account administrator, you can log in, change the basic info to your name and email as you need to. But we know and USAC knows that doesn't always work out that way. There's not always smooth transition. Not a problem. You just reach out and tell them, hey, I'm the new person. Yeah, set me up and they'll have you verify the information and get you set up for that. Now, once you log, first click that button, you get the little short terms and conditions that you agree to and then you log in. Your username is your email address and your password is a password that you create yourself. When you first get it set up with an account, your sent a message saying, okay, go and log, go to the system, say you've got your password and make up whatever password you want. So they do not issue you a password, you pick your own. The password does have, there's a couple of specific things about it. It goes on the typical security password idea of the eight characters long, one, at least an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a number and a special character. All four of those things must be somewhere in your password. Special character being, you know, asterisk, exclamation part, point, whatever. With this company that USAC is working with for Epic, they also require that you change your password every 60 days. That seems a bit excessive. If you think it is, you're right.  We did, with the e-rate system program, you're doing new forms. As I told you, there's those three forms, three or four forms you do every year. You do them every couple of months.  USAC did say to them, we can't have it changed that quickly. Can we do it less? And they said, oh, security, we need to be secure. So it had to stay that way. So most likely every time you pop back to do something in the system, it's gonna say, your password expired, please create a new one. Now, the simplest and easiest way to do that, I have a tip for you, is you do not need to change the whole password. You only really need to change one character and it will accept it as something new. I've worked with lots of libraries who every time I ask them for a, give me your password, I'll log in and I'll check out your forms. I can do that for you and see where you are in the process. And they give me their info and they've come up with a whole new password, like puppies, one, two, three exclamation point. And then the next time it's seven, eight, nine asterisks, horses. You don't need to get that confused with it. What you do is just come up with a form, a format of your password. So for example, I would do e-rate exclamation mark NLC for Nebraska Library Commission, the number one.  So e-rate exclamation mark NLC one. The next time they asked me to change my password, I changed the one to a two. Everything else stays the same. The next time, change the two to a three. And on and on and on until you go all the way through one to, through not one through nine and then start back again at one. The system only saves, I think, four to five previous passwords. So by the time you come all the way around again to one, you can start all over again. Much simpler way to do your password. I've been doing it this way since I got my account in the system in the beginning of 2016. So don't drive yourself crazy trying to come up with brand new passwords, set up a format and just change that number each time it asks you to. Does anybody have any questions right now? I see someone has a hand raised. But if you do have a question, you can type it into the question section. I can take your question there. All right. So when you first log into the system, you end up on your landing page. This is your home page for Epic. Up here it says my landing page. There are some items across the top in a menu, some items to the right to hire in a little group in a menus. And different things that you can search on here. And we're gonna go through all the different parts of this. So this is like your home page where lots of time we tell you to comb back to your landing page to start what you wanna do, to start a form, to look something up, to work on something. Now we're gonna go through each part of this so you can learn what all the different parts of the Epic system is. We're gonna work on the blue bar across the top first. The first thing on your blue bar there is news. When you open up the news, when you click on news, it brings up anything new that's in the system. This is described by USAC as your, like your inbox. These here, you can see in the screenshot, this is the schools and libraries news briefs. They put out a weekly newsletter about things related to the system, coming deadlines, tips and tricks on how to do things. Very good, I highly recommend it.  And it's not just your library, it's all participants in the program. E-rate is a public program. Anyone can go and look up online and see who's submitted something, who's received funding, it's not all hidden. So this is like a dumping ground for all applications. So some of you'll see something that says school number so and so has submitted this form. And library so and so has updated this information. You can search this to try and find your library and your library's information, but I found it to be very wonky. However, there is a trick that we just learned a couple of years ago that they give a better way where you can just find your own library's news items. If you go back to your landing page here underneath the USEC logo, it says welcome and whatever your library's name is. That's a hot link. You click on that, then you get a whole submenu of things. And one of those items is news. And when you click on that, it only brings up the news items about your organization. So only things related to what you're doing. So you can see here, this says the FCC form 46. Notification letter acknowledges that USEC received the library commission's form. Down here, it's successfully certified. You very bottom barely see it's about our 471 form, a previous form being done. So that is the way we recommend that you actually use go to access news. Go not using the blue bar up here at the top because that's just gonna get you a whole mess of things that you just don't want to deal with. Click on your library name, click news, and then you'll just have your library's news related items. As you can see here, these are notification letters, responses, USEC letting you know things that have happened with your application. The second item in the blue bar there across the top is tasks. This is forms that you are in the middle of working on. Things you've started that are in process and that you need to complete. So undone things that need to be done. As you can see here, I've got two creation ones and one that needs to be reviewed for processing. Now you may, the way the e-rate system works, as soon as you go into start a form and you haven't even entered any information yet, it puts it into your tasks. So it can be very confusing in that you haven't even entered any information and poof, you immediately have a task here. You may back out and decide, oh wait, I didn't need to do that or accidentally started that or I just wanted to look at it and see what it was like and that's fine. But you may notice in your tasks you have a lot of them here. This one that says I have three. I think the previous screen had, I took that screen shot, it was a six. That tells you how many tasks you have. But if you start having seeing a lot of them here and it's getting really unwieldy and there's so many, you probably have a bunch where you just clicked on the form, just look at it and didn't actually enter anything and then started another one and that was actually the one you submitted and you've got your leftover ones still floating around in here. And that's okay, just figure out which ones are not the ones you wanna use and there is, and I'll show it to you only see some screenshots, there's always an option to discard a form. Once you get into it, there's a discard form button. Click on that, delete the form and then it cleans up your tasks section. So I would, on a regular basis, double check everything you might see in here and determine is it actually an in process form or is it just something leftover that I didn't continue with and I wanna get rid of it and just go ahead and discard it. Now the next section across the top is records. This is a whole mishmash of things that you can look at. List of customer service cases. This is you reaching out to use that with questions, looking up your forms, making sure everything is correct. Questions, I think there's the next page has, this is scrolling, this is such a long page I had to do two screen sets of it. Knowledge base information, list of service providers, anything and everything is in here. So different things you may be doing will sometimes will say go to the records and look up that particular item. The next session in the blue bar across top is reports. They haven't really figured out what to do with this, what do people want reports of as far as e-rate, what they have so far as you can see here is the submitted modification requests. Whenever you submit a form, you can always go back and make changes to it if you realize afterwards, I made a mistake and they have where you can look that up. This is also where you can get quick back to your landing page. Also, while I'm mentioning that, anywhere where you see the USAC logo like this showing somewhere, you can click on that and it will also pop you back to your landing page. And the last question section across the top is actions. And this is also kind of a leftover things where you can, this is where you would reach out to USAC if you wanna ask them a question proactively. If you wanna look up your certified forms and here you can see in the middle here, this is something that will change depending on what's going on. They had certain, because of the hurricanes that had happened this past year, giving people a break on deadlines and things like that. They've got an order that they put out about that. I know there's one on their website too now about the wildfires in California. Any schools and libraries are affected by that. Click on here and it will tell you how you can apply for your E-rate, what kind of extension we're gonna give you on your deadlines and all that kind of thing. So that's all the menus across the top. Now, back to your landing page again, up here in the upper right, this is where you can get into your profile. This is you as an individual using the system. There's a silhouette of a head over there. You can hover over that.  You click on that. It opens up a little, a small menu where you can, this is also where you can sign out of the system. This is your log out. The system does have a 60 minute inactivity timer. If you just walk away or close the browser and walk away, but to actually cut off your connection and log out yourself, that's where your sign out is. We click on profile. That brings you to information about your particular profile for you. This, as you can see here, it has things kind of related to social media-related type things. This company that does this system, they obviously, they make other, they use this as a basis for other companies doing things with it. And a lot of this E-rate just doesn't use. There's followers following. I could put a profile picture if I wanted to. I could change this background picture to something, but it's not really anything we use in the system. Feel free to if you want to. But what you do want to update is things about you. So if you go to related actions right there and then manage epic user profile, this is your own information. This is where you can change your phone number, email address, mailing address, title, anything that you need to in the system. And then there's the second half of that page with the rest of the address information. So this is where you can keep your information up to date. Now, as the account administrator, you can also manage other users. So there's a link here to manage users. This would be for adding or modifying any other people that you want to be able to use the system. It does, you do need to select your library. Now, you're probably the only library listed in this list existing organizations as I am here for the library commission. So it does seem kind of weird to select from a list of one, but the system is made for the largest organizations that might be using it, like a school district with a hundred schools and they need all of them listed here individually or a library system with 50 branches. But you just select yourself and then you can create a new user or you can add or remove existing users and then work on just the user permissions if you want to. But to add somebody new access, you just get a whole blank form here where you can put in their name, title, email address, mailing address, all the basic information that they need. Once you set someone up with an account in here, it sends an email to them that they then use to create their, to complete creating their account and make up whatever their password's gonna be. Also, farther below on this page is where you pick the user permission for the person. And this is what I was talking, I mentioned earlier, full users, full rights users can do everything. Partial can work on the forms, but can't actually submit them and view only can only see the forms that are out there. You can see here too that you can do it by each form or what each thing is that might be done so you can pick and choose what somebody can do. And so it can be different from form to form to being view, partial, or full rights.  That's just much easier so you can at least do everything. And then what you would do is pick and choose if you do have other people what they can and can't have access to as you think is appropriate. Now you can also manage your organization. This is the information about your library. Same way as doing a user, you just choose your library, choose manage it. And then this is where you can update information about your library. Now this is a pretty long page. You can have multiple screens showing each section as you would have scrolled down. If your library moves or changes their address, you can change that here. Latitude and longitude would be used for determining urban and rural location, but down here you can see it's actually filled in there. That's like I said, off of census data. Next down you can see what is the mailing address if it's the same or not. You can enter your phone number, if you wanna put a different email, another email contact, website if you want to. None of this is required. As you can see, the only ones that are required have a little asterisk, but you could put extra info in here if you wanted to. Information about your library. What kind of library are you? Are you a public library, private? What do you do? Are you also tribal? Are you working, do you have a bookmobile? Here at the library commission, we're a state library. So we chose state library agency and main branch. It may seem a little weird to say we're the main branch because the library commission, we're just one location. But for all you guys who are all individual public libraries, you should make sure that main branch is selected as well. Even though you're a single location, you still need to be considered as a main branch. You are the only branch to make sure that everything works in the system for you. If it's not already there by default, make sure that's selected. Over here also is where you enter the square footage of your library to be used to do that category two calculation for your budget. So this is where you enter that number of whatever is your square, how many square feet your building is. And then if you do complete a request for category two, this is where it will look to take that and do the math for you. The last thing, oh, then there's your associated school district. If it hasn't already selected the one that's the one that you are in, there's a search here that you could use to look up the correct one. But if it's already here and it's the correct one, you just use it. This is, it needs to know what your associated school district is to do that discount calculation. The previously as a library, we had to enter what the discount numbers were into our e-rate applications. Now with this system where everybody is all connected and together, the school puts in their numbers and because we are associated with them, it just automatically feeds into our forms. We actually no longer need to do that calculation for completing any forms as a public library. But if you ever want to know ahead of time and you know, or double check what it is, you can do that calculation. But now it's just automatic. Your associated school district, when you complete a form, it will automatically be completed for you. And the last thing in here that you need is an FCC registration number. This is something new to the system since they started doing it this way that you may not realize you have or you might not have one. Any entities doing business with the FCC has to have this kind of number. Kind of like a social security number, but for you as a business and specifically for doing business as in getting money related to the FCC. If there's not already in there in your account, you can look it up on this FCC website and you can request one if you don't have one. If you look your library up and there's nothing, it's an automated thing, email comes to you within a couple of minutes, boom, you got it, you're good to go. So that is all the basics of navigating the Epic system. Any questions? Any questions section there if you have anything you wanna ask? All right, cause next we are going to get into the forms themselves. Actually submitting, looking at what the forms are and what they all do. I know there's a lot of background we've already done here, but all that you need to know before you start getting into the forms themselves. Now this is a table here of the various forms of the process and in the order they are done along with other things that USAC does on their side. And deadlines and this is specific to funding year 2019. Now one question I get often and I did mention it a bit earlier is when is the deadline to apply for E-rate? The deadline meaning when is the latest I can do the first form in the process, the 470 and still participate in the next year? We don't know what the deadline is right now. The deadline for E-rate is actually based on the second form in the process. The second form in our process, the 471 is only available during a short period of time. It's called the application filing window. It's about 75 days and it generally falls December to March, January, February, March and it varies every year. It's a different specific dates each year that is determined and designated by the FCC. And I'm gonna see here, I just wanna double check. One thing before I go on, just to see if it, no, all right. And as of now, I was just double checking my email. We do not know what that date is, the window is. It has not been announced by the FCC yet. So until those dates are known and the window is a start date and end date, after you file the form 470, the first form of the process where you start the process, you've got to wait 28 days before filing the second form. You have to give a time for companies to reach out to you and to work everything out. And then you can do the 471. You have to have that 28 days between those two forms being submitted. So to figure out what the deadline is for the first form, you look at the final date for the filing window of the second form, back up 28 days, that's the deadline for the first form of the 470. That gives you the minimum amount of time you need before you can do the 471. So 470, 28 days, 471. Until we know the filing window dates, we don't know the deadline for the 470. The most we do know is they have said they're shooting for January through March to be the filing window. Mid-January to mid or end March, maybe, as I said, we haven't even been given any potential dates yet. So that would put the deadline for the 470, as I had mentioned earlier, sometime in February. It's available right now for you to submit. It's been available actually since the summer. It goes live the summer before the year that it's for. But we're looking at sometime in February, specific dates to be announced. As soon as we know them, I will be sending them out to all our mailing lists, be on our website, our blog, or Facebook page. Everywhere and anywhere we can think to put it. And on the USACL, have it on their website, what the filing window is. I was hoping they'd have it announced by today. This is my online workshop for E-Rate for this year so that I could have it in this for you and in the recording. But I just checked my email and we don't know yet. So keep your eyes open for that. And then, so we don't know exactly what deadlines are. Other things do have specific deadlines that we will get into as we talk about each of these forms. This is a table that I actually have on our E-Rate website as well. And I've got the one up there right now for 2018 that does have the specific dates because we of course knew them. And as soon as I know the dates for this, this will be posted as well with what the dates are. And you can have this as like kind of a cheat sheet of when everything is supposed to be done, in what order, and what the actual dates are. So the first form in the E-Rate process is the 470. The form 470 is to request services. And what this actually does is it officially, legally, opens a competitive bidding process. This is what you're actually doing with E-Rate when you open up, as I said, it is public, everything that is out there. You are officially saying I am looking for someone to provide a service to me, whether it is my monthly internet, whether it is I just wanna buy some routers and switches, whatever it is. And then what the general idea of what the process would be is then companies would reach out to you and submit their quotes to you and their information, but what they can provide. And then you would decide which one is best and which one you wanna choose. That's the big process for this. Now, most likely in many of your areas, there isn't a lot of competition for either monthly internet or even buying equipment or anything. So you don't really have competition. So there isn't going to be a, I gotta compare this company to this company and decide what I'm gonna do. But you do have to go through the process and follow the steps and play the game for E-Rate to get the funding. So it is what you are doing here is officially opening it up. Now, since this has become a much more popular process and lots of new companies are popping up to provide internet services and discounted services and tech support and whatnot, some people are getting contacted by businesses they've never heard of before. Sometimes for the first time, you've got your same company you've been getting internet from for the last 10 years, you're just gonna continue with them and you just wanna keep going and that's fine. And then out of the blue, you suddenly receive, I knew at somebody saying, hey, we provide internet service, here's what we do and here's what we charge. You will have to look at those emails and contacts that you might get and evaluate them very closely, reach out back to them and say, oh really? Here's where I am in Nebraska and here's what I would like, do you provide it? What we are discovering is that many of these companies are not even providing services to Nebraska or are not providing services to your area in Nebraska. We've had some difficulties with even out of state companies. As I said, this is all public and I think a lot of these companies are doing phishing expeditions, just saying, oh hey, we do internet, here I'm gonna send an email to everyone who's applied for internet and see if we can get more business. Well, then you proceed to reach out to them and say, oh hi, we are in our Scribner, Nebraska. Oh, what, where? We don't provide service to Scribner, Nebraska, we're in Omaha only. Okay, fine.  You also maybe have companies reach out to you who don't even providing the service that you asked for through e-rate. I had that here at the library commission, we used to do telephone and we have our local long distance and we have a couple of 800 lines for you guys to reach out to us. But I would constantly get responses back saying, in response to your Form 470, here's our cell phone products. Well, I never put cell phone on my e-rate application, we didn't, we don't have that. So it was a moot thing, I was just able to just delete the email and say, no, I don't have to respond to you, I don't have to even evaluate or look at what you're saying to me because we, I did not put any e-rate service on my 470, so whatever you're trying to sell me, claiming to be in the guise of in response to your e-rate Form 470 was actually not. So pay attention to them if you do get any of them. And we'll get more into that competitive bidding in a few slides here. Now, there are a couple of situations where you do not need to do a 470 actually and you can actually start with a second form in the process, the 471. If you have a multi-year contract, so if you have signed many times service providers will say, if you lock in to us and sign a contract for three years, we will give you a cheaper rate on your internet, we'll give you a deal and you'll also be locked into that rate for three years. You start that contract for the first year and you do a 470 that first year, but for each following year that you're still in that contract, you don't want to be opening up for any other companies to contact you because you're already in a deal with one. So you don't file a new one for those years that's in effect during those years, you just wait until the filing window opens for the 471 and you're basically just telling you, sec, yep, we're still with them, next year, yep, we're still with them, until the contract expires and then when you have to sign a new one, that's when you do a 470 and do that official process to start everything up again. Now, this is only if you've signed an actual contract with the beginning and end date. I know many of your deals with the providers are just an ongoing month to month deal with the internet service provider, there isn't an actual contract with an end date. In those cases, you would do a 470 every year just to keep it going each time. Now, the other situation when it was something new that the FCC came up with is if you can get really fast internet at a really good price, you don't even have to do competitive bidding at all, you can just take the deal. And this is a specific criteria it has to meet that it is less than $300 a month and at least 100 megabits download and 10 megabits per second upload. The 10 megabits upstream is not too difficult, 100 megabits per second. There's not a lot of places yet that are offering that as to the general public business class type internet services. I've asked this, I've been doing my in-person classes the last couple of weeks and people are like, yeah, maybe no, not really. And if you can find this deal, that's great. I had one library one year who said, we get 90 megabits per second. If I can convince my provider just to bump us up 10, we can skip this whole competition in a whole form of the process and only have to do two forms a year. And it was, you know, that's a huge deal. Not only did you cut out a whole form, you have to worry about. I think this is a great idea. And I think the FCC's idea is if we push this that this is a thing that if a provider will provide this really good price with this really fast speed, you are locked in to getting a lot of business from these schools and libraries because they will go to you because we are giving them an easier in and you an easier in to getting your e-mail discount. So this is something new that just came up with the modernization starting in 2015, 2016. So I don't think so far, not a lot of providers have jumped on with it yet, but I'm hoping and thinking that this will gradually become a thing. Ask your provider about it. The only way they're gonna know that you might want it is if you reach out to them and say, could you give us this kind of deal? If you can, we are good to go for e-ray and this is great.  So hopefully this will become more common and you'll be able to just skip this whole thing that I'm gonna teach you about right now. Now, to do your form for 70 from your landing page in the menu systems, a menu, I don't even know what to call this, group of links up here. We've got FCC form for 70 link, you click on that. And as soon as you click on that, that creates a task. This is what I was talking about earlier that your tasks make it filled up and filled up. You haven't, even if you haven't entered anything yet in the form, in this screenshot, I've entered the application nickname. But if that's even blank, as soon as I've clicked that link on that landing page, the system automatically creates something in that tasks. So pay attention, down here is that discard form button that I mentioned to you. Keep it, keep your tasks cleaned up. If you discover you've submitted your forms, your 470, you know you're good and you've got other ones floating around in there, go in and clean them up and delete them.  And that can get annoying to keep getting those emails. So keep an eye on cleaning those up. But the first thing you do need to do is create an application nickname. You can see everything that's required is gonna have a little asterisk by it. There, when you start an application form here, you'll see it's given a form number, nine, 10 digit number here. You're not gonna remember that number and that's okay. You give it a nickname instead, it's something that you'll remember for this particular year. As I said earlier, you may be working up multiple years at the same time and when USAC reaches out to you, they're gonna reference with questions, form number, blah, blah, blah, but they'll also mention the nickname you gave it to. So you see for this one, I gave it a FY 2019 470. So funding year 2019 is my form 470. You can make it be whatever you want. Then we save and continue to go on to the next page. Once you've started doing this form now, it will save as you go too. You can always go back. There's no final save when you get out of doing it in the middle of it, it saves as you go. And if you get pulled away to do something else, if you get a phone call, if you realize you get to a part in the form and you don't have the information you need to complete it, you can always jump back into it. And this is a good thing for those tasks when it has things in process.  So the second page here, as you can see here, this is nothing that you can click on at all. All of this is pulled from your organization profile and automatically filled into the form. In the past, all these things you had to enter, your library name, your address, what type of library you are. You now, you just create that one organization profile and every time you do a new form, it fills in everything automatically for you. Now we have two choices of what to do next, save and share and save and continue. Save and share is only if you need to, if you are not the person who can maybe submit and complete this form and there's someone else who you've also created an Epic account for who you want to look at it. So you would share it to that person and say, hey, so-and-so, can you double check what I did here? Maybe you're asking your tech person and you've set up them over an account. If you're just the one person doing things, you're just gonna keep going through this form, saving, continue and moving on. That's the main thing to keep doing just to keep submitting the different parts of the form. So on the next page is consultant and contact information. Consultants, there are companies out there that you can pay to do your ERA applications for you that might sound like a great deal, but generally they're for large organizations, school districts with tons of schools, libraries with multiple branches, 50 branches, and then you pay them to do the application for you. If you had one of those, they'd be info being your organization. But the question you do need to answer is are you the main contact person? If you're not, you'd enter someone else's. But if you say yes, it automatically pulls from your profile. Same thing, you don't have to enter it in there, you just say, yep, it's me. And then we save and continue. And now this is where we can pick what category of service we're going to be requesting E-rate funding for. You can do both either category one by checking the category one box or category two, or you can do both on one form 470. And then we'll save and continue. I'm gonna show you examples. I'm gonna, I selected both for this example because I'm gonna show you how to do both. Now the next page is about doing an RFP. Do you have a RFP for what you're requesting? That'd be like a request for proposal, a request for quote. These would generally be if you had a larger project that you're working on like, we're building a new library building or we're building a new lab onto our library. You may have some, a lot more detail that you want to explain to service providers and companies so that they understand what you want. And if you have some sort of document that says that, this is where you could upload it. If you're just looking for just our basic monthly internet and I wanna buy some routers, you don't probably have or need a document like that. So you would have an RFP and you'd just do the application without one. The 470 itself in that case for something simpler serves as your RFP. So this is just to show you where you would put that in. We're gonna say no for this particular example and save and continue. Now this is the page where you can add your requests for category one or category two. I'm gonna start with add category two and there's an add new service request button here that you click on. Everything they talk, I call them is a service request whether it's an actual service or a piece of equipment is just the e-ray working. Now when you click on that, it brings up a screen, your next screen where it talks about the different types of services that you can apply for. And this little help thing, a guide here is automatically opened up to show you what they all are and give you definitions of them. So some tips here about what to pick and what not to pick. We talked before about fiber. There's a least lit fiber option and there is a least dark and lit fiber together option. And I had mentioned earlier, USAC recommends, even if you're not sure if there is lit fiber or dark fiber, choose the one that's both least dark and lit together just so you can cover all your bases. Your form 470 is kind of like your wish list. It's not always gonna be everything you end up getting potentially, but it's like what you'd like to have.  Is there someone with fiber? Is there dark fiber around somewhere that I wasn't aware of? So you can put things in your 470 that you don't actually end up with. Your 471, the second form is when you say, here's what we ended up with. That is the things you're actually getting. It's okay if something's on this form, the 470 that doesn't end up on that one. But in reverse, anything you do want to get a discount on on your 471, the second form, when you're telling a USAC, here's what we've got. You gotta make sure you do request that on the first form. Otherwise, you're fine to get the service. You just won't get a discount on it. It's true, you're right. So if you wanted to investigate doing fiber, choose the least dark and least lit together. Now you'll see there's multiple options here for things having to do with internet. And there's internet access and transport bundled, transport only no ISP service, internet access ISP service only no transport circuit. This is very confusing wording as far as I'm concerned. And I wish it would be even more clear to libraries about what they all mean. But the basics is, you may not realize it, but when you are getting internet, there's actually two things that go into getting it. Generally, you end up with just a bundle price that's everything together. But there's the service itself, and then there's getting the service to you. And that's the service being the internet access and the transport being getting it to you. For larger organizations or more complex systems, those could be two separate things you pay for, separately on different items in your bill or to different providers potentially. And you may need to indicate them separately. 99% of the time though here with our basic libraries, they're just applying for their internet. It's all gonna be bundled together and it's just one thing. So you're gonna wanna choose internet access and transport bundled. Not one of the ISP only or the transport only. If you do one of those or the other, you're gonna miss out on half of your discount and it's just gonna be confusing and difficult. So if you got your basic internet, like your cable modem, DSL, wireless, satellite, that's internet access and transport bundled. If you're looking into fiber, you wanna do least dark and lit fiber together. And then the other things here, if you need, if you want them, if you're looking for maintenance and operations, so someone to do support for you, if you're gonna buy some actual equipment, if you're gonna have some of that special construction done of this category one, and remember this is category one, getting stuff, the connection to your building, you would check those as well. Each of these things, you do one at a time. So you're gonna go in one at a time and select these from the menu and place their, add the request. So above all this information where it explains them is the pull down menu here to open up and pick what we're going to pick. And in this example, I'm gonna do, I think I do the internet access and transport bundled. When you choose that, the next screen, it gives you some more questions you have to answer about the specifics of what connection you want. How many circuits, how many internet connections you're gonna have generally for our libraries is gonna be one connection into the building. And then what is your speed limits? Here I did 50 megabits minimum, or no, 10 megabits per second minimum and 50 megabits per second maximum. This is where you can think big too. Think beyond what you're currently getting. If you're getting 20, 25 right now, put down 50. Maybe your provider actually does offer faster and maybe you can afford it with e-rate. Maybe a different provider is coming to town who might have it. To get that 100 megabits deal, maybe look at that, maybe bump it up even to 100 as your choice. These pull downs actually go up to gigabits in speed. So for any areas that are getting, Google's bringing in the gigabits, you could even add those. Number of entities served, how many libraries, how many locations are you generally, you're just one. And then do you need installation, activation and configuration? If it's just, I'm just continuing getting my regular internet service that's already connected, no. If you're needing some special construction done, you would do yes. Then you would add. And then you'll see it'll pop you back to that page where we started this and it started a table here listing all the different, what you've added and the different answers you gave. Now if you checked in this box here, you could edit or remove it if you decide you made a mistake. You can also add a second one. So I wanted to add now the fiber choice. I do the same thing, add new service request, go to that pull down, pick fiber and then do the specifics about what the speed is that I want the fiber to be. There's also a narrative box here. If you feel the need or you need to tell a little more detail about what you're getting, maybe not a full on RFP like the document we could have uploaded earlier but just a little bit something, you could indicate that here. Here I just wrote an example, monthly internet service for public library. But you can have it be whatever you want. Now once you follow category ones in here, we can scroll down the page to adding category two requests. And it works the same other way, add new service request. But you've got different options now because category two is different things. There's in turn the internal connections, basic maintenance of those connections, the support and maintenance and then that managed internal broadband services. So you choose whichever one it is you're going for. And then you'll see here because we chose internal connections when we open up the function pull them menu is all the different pieces of equipment we could possibly ask for. Cableing, wiring, routers, switches, battery, wireless access points, anything you need to see here. And each one of these you'd have to do one at a time adding them to your list of things that you're gonna be doing. So if you're gonna be doing multiple items here, you're gonna be going back and forth, adding one, adding the next one, adding the next one. So I think here we chose cable. Yeah.  How many feet of cable do you want? I put 500. I don't know if that's appropriate for doing a linear lab or whatnot, but I just threw that in there. You can also choose a certain manufacturer. If you do have to work with some particular brand for some reason, you could be able to pick that from this menu. But if you don't care, we recommend say no preference so that whenever your service provider or your company can get you, they'll be able to use it. If they have a certain one that they use, but you put a different manufacturer here, you're welcome to use it, but you won't get any rate discount on it. So if there isn't a real good reason why you have to pick use some particular company, you would say no preference. Same thing, number of entities, we're just one library. And then same question, do you need installation, activation and configuration? In this case, I don't know how to install cable. So I'm gonna say yes, please have somebody come and install this for me. And then you click the add button and it will now add it to your list, just like the category one one. Now, if I wanna add some other ones, we add new service requests and I've gone through and done that for a couple of times to then show you here after we've done each one, it keeps adding them to list. So I went in once, chose my router. I just want a single one. In this case, it's not feet or anything, it's just I need a router. And then I need three wireless access points. That's what I was looking for this year on category two. I just keep going through it over and over until you keep adding them all. Now, there's one other question up here that you've seen, I haven't referred to yet here, installment payment plan. For some of these things, especially construction, special construction charges, you said does know, realize that it might cost a lot and you might need to be doing an installment plan, not just a one-time payment to whoever you're having to your construction for you. That's okay. They just wanna know if you are doing that kind of a payment so that they know how they will do your discounts and you would say yes or no there. Now, on the next screen, this is very hard to read, I know, but this is just to show you, you can see when you're done with all your category one and all your category two, what it looks like. Category ones, you've got your narrative, payment plan, yes or no, category twos, and it's narrative.  When you're totally done at the bottom, just a save and continue button and then it wants to know your technical contact. So that's everything about what services we're looking for. Now I just got a few last few things to give them information about. Do you have someone different you would like a company to talk to rather than you about the technical issues? Do you have an IT person? Do you have someone who knows more about your network than you know that you would like them to talk to if they have any questions when these companies reach out to you about providing the service or getting you the router or the switches that you want. If there's not, you'd say no, and that's fine, they just talk to you. If there is, you'd say yes, and then if you've given them an account in the Epic system, a user account like we talked about earlier, you could search and find their account or you can just enter it manually. You might have a tech person but they don't need to know about e-rate, they don't need to have an account in here to do anything, but you wanna make sure that a company talks to them and not you, you could enter manually. And that's what I've done here, I've then entered the information manually of Sue Storm is my IT person, there's her phone number and email for them to reach out to instead of me because I'm the director and I don't know how my network, I don't know anything about my network, that's what I've got her for. Once you've got that info entered into there, we'd save and continue. If you don't have a tech person, you'd say no, and just it'll be you. The next question is about state or local procurement requirements. Are there any state or local competitive bidding requirements that apply to you getting services? At the state level, we do not have any rules about how you do it. So for us, you would say, you know, the answer is no. You would need to know yourself if there's any state or any local procurement. Does your city or your county, if your county library have any rules about how you get services, new services like this? And if there are, you'd say yes and then it would have where you could give them the information about what those are or to look at where those rules are listed somewhere. But once you've got that answered, we are done putting our information in and now instead of saving and continuing, it has the option is to review the 470. When you click review, it then says when it is going to create a PDF of what you've submitted and a task will become available to complete the certification. That's up in your tasks section that we talked about before. This is pretty instantaneous actually. I think it took me when I was doing this, not even 30 seconds at the most, depending on the time of day. So what you would do right away is click on that tasks at the top there. And you'll see here, when I, by the time I clicked over there, it said one minute ago. So it would not even in a minute, it was ready for a link. And now instead of having one that says, you see all these other ones say create, those are the ones that I'm in the middle of doing and haven't gotten to that review section yet, session part yet. This one now says certify. So you're going to go and look at, verify the information and actually sign off and submit the form. When you click on that, it actually pops you back into your form and there is a link to download the PDF document so that you can look at it and review it ahead of time. I review it and see if it's all correct. You'll see here, there is a continue to certification button, but it's light blue, not that dark blue we've been seeing because it's not active yet because there's this little box here that says by checking this box, I certify the information the PDF document above is correct. Now, if you're sure everything's correct, sure, go ahead and check that and go on, but might as well click on here, open up your PDF. It just does it in your, whatever you use for your PDFs. You can look at all the information in it and here's the top part, information with the library. If you scroll down, there's the category one and two requests I submitted, my technical information. This I would then save as I'm talking about saving your own copies of you since you're in your regular PDF software, go ahead and download it, save it on your computer somewhere for your reference. Then go back into your, that just opens up a new window. So you move back over to your browser window that you've been doing this in, check the box certifying. Now, the certification button is live, click on that and it will continue, bump you over to your certification. This is a, are you sure you wanna certify? Question will pop up, this function will send you to certify, are you sure you wanna proceed? Say yes. And then this brings up this really long screen that's hard to read, that's all your legalese, the certifications, the notices, and everything, all the legal wording that you need to go through. Feel free to read it all if you want to. But this top section there I've zoomed into here where you can see the different certifications. All of these boxes you have to check.  So you do need to check every single one of these boxes before you'll be able to actually certify. And you'll notice here, this has also got a little button down here, that little light blue, same thing, it's not active yet. Until you check all these boxes, it doesn't go become live. Once you check them all, it will now become a blue button that you can click on. When you click on that, it will then pop up the scary notification. This is a scary one that says, fault statements on this form may result in civil liability and or criminal prosecution. This is their last chance of telling you this is a legal form, you are submitting to federal government, make sure that it's all okay that you're supposed to be doing this. Hopefully you'll say yes and go ahead and submit your form. When it's submitted, you're done, it pops you back your landing page. Now you can from here, and that's it, your form is submitted, but you can check and see if, just if you're concerned to make sure that it has been done. Down here at the bottom of your landing page is where you can look up all your forms that you have submitted and at what stage they're, and you'll find out what stage they're at. So I zoom that in a little bit here. You can look up all the different types of forms, 470, 471, whichever one, and different funding years. And I just did 2016, that's the last time the commission has done anything. And you see, I actually got two results in my search, one certified, one incomplete. So this will keep track of any ones you have in process. So you can see that they're still here. And you can see here once, since that says certified, I know it's actually been submitted and I am good. I've done the first step of the process. Also from here, this nickname here is actually a hot link. You can click on that and it will bring up the web version of your form. Same thing as that PDF version that you printed and downloaded, but just the same information online. You could print this out if you wanna do as well, but this is where it's saved within the system for you in the web version. Now, once you submitted this, you will receive a response back from USAC. Every time you submit something to them, they send something back, saying we got your letter, we got your form, we did the thing. It's called a receipt notification letter. It summarizes what you did. You can use this to make corrections or changes.  This also gives you your allowable contract date. That's that 28 days that I mentioned before that you have to wait before you can do your 470. It's gonna tell you today is this date, so now here's the actual date when you can do the 471 for the first time and so that you know that's when I have to wait till. And here is the form, the letter in your news section and it'll be in there. You can see here it says USAC's Nebraska Library Commission's 470 was successfully posted. The allowable contract date is, in this case, 426, 2016. So you'll have right there telling you that's the date, that's the next time I can, that's the earliest I can come back and do the second step in the form. It's that second form in the process. You can't do it any earlier. That's not exactly correct. You shouldn't do it anywhere earlier. The system will let you do it earlier, but if you go and do your second form before that 28 days has gone, you will be denied. You will not get your e-rate discount. That is breaking the rules. You have to wait those 28 days. I wish the system was smart enough to stop you from doing it, but it's not yet. That would be a nice thing that will just block you from being able to submit it, but you have to wait till that date. Now, what's great about this system is when that date comes up, system will automatically email you, push out an email to you, and this is to your personal e-rate email account. This isn't just within Epic, within that new section or anything in there. To your personal email account, I'll send an email saying, allowable contract date has been reached. Allowable contract date for SVC Form 470, blah, blah, has been reached. You may now close your bidding process and go on to the next step in the process. So this is great. You don't even have to keep going, logging into Epic and checking, or remember, what was the date? Did I reach it yet? As soon as it is reached, you're gonna get an email letting you know you're good to go, you can go on to the next step in the process. I love that. It will also put that same letter in your news section of your Epic account as well. So if you wanted to read it there, you've got it there, but it also sends you that email. Any questions about the 470? Do any questions about the first form in the process? You type into your question section. Anything you wanna know more about services to apply for any of that? No? All right. Type in if you do have any questions. Cause now we're gonna go on to, now we're gonna go on to competitive bidding. So just to explain to you a little bit about what that means. Now, as I mentioned at the very beginning here, odds are you won't have any competition. You have the company you're with. There's only the one other company in town that does equipment and routers. It might even be your service provider that does it, not even a separate company. Who knows? But in case you do have to go into this. Oh, wait, question. Does USAC still have, so we do have a question. A form 470 search for service providers outside of Epic. Yes, I believe so. There is on the USAC website where you can search for forms that have been submitted. Yes, 470s, 471s, everything in the process. And if we have time at the end, I do show where our website is, so I can show you that too. But I'm not sure if you mean, some service providers can only go on to Epic. I think they have both. You can either look at what's been submitted on the USAC website, or there's also places, there is also places within Epic where you can look to. But there is definitely stuff online.  And that's a good question just for libraries too, that this person is asking about for service providers to look up to find out if they want to reach out to you. But you as a library, you can look up and see what's been submitted as well, see what your forms are that are out there, or see other libraries information that's out there in case you're curious or want some ideas of what other your neighbors or your colleagues are doing. So competitive bidding. We're gonna go, as I said, this probably isn't something you'll have to do, but if you do, if you do, every now and then there are some companies that do reach out to you and it is an actual valid company. They're providing the service you asked for on your 470, they're actually providing service to your area and you do need to compare them to your current company. If you get a valid, some company reaching out to you, can't just dismiss it because you want to go with your current company, you've got to go through an evaluation comparing them and going with whoever is the most cost effective.  This is done during, after you submit your 470, you wait that 28 days before you can evaluate any of them. You have to wait 28 days before you can do the 471 and you have to wait the 28 days until you start comparing anybody as well.  Everyone has to have a fair and equal ability to reach out to you before you start comparing everything you've received. Fair. Now, as I said, you have to have a fair and an open bidding process, treating all vendors the same. You can't give anyone any, there we go, any special treatment, you can't tell one company, well, we're gonna go with you, but don't worry about it. You've got to let everyone have access to all the same information, but what you're looking for, you have to answer all their questions. The vendors, they can't be involved in what's on your 470 and telling you what you should put down to make them get the bid, win the bid. And what you must, the way you must determine who you pick is the most cost-effective bid and cost being the primary factor, not the only factor. Cost-effective isn't always cheapest. There's two different, those are two different things. And sometimes it's hard to figure out what that means. How do I, what is that all about? E-rate doesn't want you to do the cheapest, they want it to be cost-effective, they want the program monies to be used to the best way they can be. And to do this, you can document if you had to compare different companies. And this is just an example, a sample of a way that you can do this kind of evaluation in competitive bidding. This is just one way to do it, you can have other ways you might want to do it but this is just a good example of how this all works. As I said, price has to be the primary factor. So you're gonna figure out, there's gonna be lots of things that are gonna be important to you in choosing a provider. It's not always gonna be price, going with the cheapest doesn't always work out as I'm sure we've all discovered over time. But there's other things that matter to you and that are important. Prior experience with a certain company, are they your current company? Are they some new guy you've never heard of? Are there other services they offer and what do they cost? How do they give you your discounts? Are they a local or are they from out of the state? You just decide what is important to you. It can be these things, it can be other things, it can be some of these things, however you wanna determine it. Price has to be the most important factor, meaning it has to be worth the most. Here we've said you can earn up to a total of 100 points each company can. Price is worth 30 of those points and everything else is worth less, as you can see. Prior experience is 20, price for other stuff is 25, they can earn 15 for what kind of discount they'll give you, five for environmental, five for being local. So this is how you show to USAC that yes, price was what I gave the most weight to. And then you see what the different companies said, these are the three different companies and decide who you're gonna go with. Now you can see here, vendor three, they earn the most points, 92, they'll be the one you go with. However, you can see that vendor two got the full 30 points on price, but they didn't have the most points in total. They were the cheapest, but they weren't the best. And that is how you determine who you're gonna go with and how you show USAC and any of these companies, this is why this company didn't win. You can see the big deal, the big difference here was prior experience. Some new company came into town, gave out, got had lower prices than anybody previously, but we don't know them at all. They're brand new, we have no clue, no experience, we don't know how their customer service is. So we give them a zero on that. And because of that, vendor three, you know, they're not the cheapest. They were, you know, they won 25 points, they're better than vendor one, but they weren't the cheapest. They are the one that you can go with and that is okay. Price being the primary factor does not mean being the only factor and price is not, you do not always go with the cheapest. So put in here, whatever you want to be is your important thing. Now, if you wanna make sure you're sticking with your current provider, this is how you make, figure out what it is that's important to you so that you can get the most points to your provider if you have somebody new coming in. I mean, this obvious prior experience or being local are two very important things that could really turn the tables on the new company from out of state or the new company in town losing out even though they're cheaper to your current provider. Now, if you do wanna go with the cheaper one, you know, you can do that too.  If you do this kind of thing, if you do get multiple companies contacting you and you do some sort of thing like this, save this document. This is something that, whoops, that needs to be with all that information that you save for those 10 years so that if anyone does come back to you and say, hey, why did you pick so-and-so over so-and-so? You've got the proof right here. This company, vendor two, could come back to you or go to USAC and say, hey, we know we're the cheapest in town. How could they not have picked us? And this is how you show them why because we don't know you is basically the answer here. Now, there's a couple other situations that you might need to deal with this as well. What if you have an existing contract? What if you did sign a contract before you did your 470, before you even started the process and you want to be able to continue with them? In the past, it was, oh, you're out of luck. You can't do it. But USAC has given us new guidance on how to deal with that and be able to get your ERA discount on an existing contract. What you would do is just post an 470 like you usually do. No problem. Wait the 28 days as you're supposed to but then that existing contract can be considered a response, a bid response. If you receive any other bids you would compare that existing contract to them. Now, hopefully that one will win out because you already signed it. If it is the winning bid, you're great. You can now apply for funding using that as your bid and get your ERAIT. However, if someone else ends up being it, I mean, you'd have to figure out what to do. If someone else ends up being cheaper then you have to stick with the existing contract. In that case, you'd be out of luck for getting ERAIT because you weren't able to go with the most cost effective as far as what ERAIT rules are. But this is how you can still get your ERAIT discount if the situation works out for you on existing contract. Now, what if you have no bids or only one? That's okay as well. If you receive only one bid, you can just go with it. You don't have to have a competition. You just document it yourself, send yourself an email saying or write a memo, we only received one bid this year. So that's who we're going with. If you didn't receive any, you can reach out. Maybe your local company just assumed, your current company just assumed you'd go with them. But if you don't have something from them, you're gonna need something documented. So give them a little nudge say, hey, so-and-so, we are doing ERAIT.  And then you'll have that in your records to show that yes, we did talk to them about what they're gonna be able to provide to us.  As I mentioned before, though, there's the application following window to deal with, even if your 28 days comes up, if you haven't, that window hasn't opened, you still gotta wait for that window.  So you might end up, depending on when you started your process, your 470, you might end up, even after those 28 days, having to sit back and wait for the window to open up. Which right now, we're talking January, so if you haven't started anything yet, you'll probably be in the window with your 28 days based on a starting point of today. Now, the second form in the process is your 471. And this is where you tell USAC who you went with and how much it cost. You also certify your compliance with all rules. This is where your discount calculation is automatically dumped in from the school lunch numbers, from what schools have put in. At this point, you can communicate with your provider. If you need help with what service you actually ended up with, what kind of equipment you're gonna be getting, this is the point where you are allowed, now that you've picked what you're gonna go with, to work with them on what you're actually getting, also on how you want to get your discount. Discounts on your bills or reimbursement, and we'll get into that.  Ideally, this would have been a slide that had actual filing window dates, but as I mentioned, as I just looked, there has not been any announcement for that yet, so we don't have anything to fill in here yet. As soon as we know, you'll know. 471, you have to do every year. Now the 471 starts in the same place up here, next to the 470, there's a link for that. For a screen that looks very similar, you give it a nickname, and then say continue and continue on. Now I am not gonna be able to show you screenshots of this whole process right now, because as I mentioned, it's the form is not available because it doesn't become available until the window opens sometime, hopefully, maybe in January. But yeah, so, and you can see here, this is the screenshot from 2018 from last year. I can't even start a new one if you're upcoming year. So they do change things, as I said, they tweak the eligible funding list every year. They also tweak the form every year, so I don't even wanna show you this in an old form because some things may look potentially different in the 471 coming up, but that's okay. What I do have this year, I can just explain to you a little bit about what kind of things will go into the 471. You're gonna create a funding request, they call it an FRN, because it has given a number for each thing that you're asking for. Now for the 471, you do need to do a separate form for each category, category one and category two. Which is different from the 470. On one form 470, you can apply for both category one and category two services. When you get to the second step, this one you're gonna have to submit two different form 471s. You'll go through the whole process once for all your category one services, everything you've asked for on that, and then you go back and start a second form 471 and do everything for category two. Just the way the system works, at this point, it can't handle doing both of those together on one. You will list each type of service that you have asked for, whether it's your internet access, any kind of service, all your different internal connections in your equipment, and then you'll have line items, and this is where you're gonna put in how much the items, how much each thing costs, what you're going to be charged, what your monthly fee is gonna be, how much the piece of equipment's gonna cost, that goes into your line items. This is a part where some people get lost in the process because it's multiple steps drilling down into the 471, but one tip is, if you haven't put in a monetary amount, an amount of money yet, you haven't finished it yet, and that's why you're probably getting error messages. I've got many people who get error messages and don't know why it's saying they didn't do something because they know they went through parts of it, but they never went one step down deeper about the actual, how much am I gonna pay for this item? So keep that in mind when you're doing a 471, make sure you get down to the part where it asks you how much it's gonna cost. Funding request numbers are assigned to each item that you ask for, ask for a discount on. Keep that in mind when USAC reaches out to you with questions, they're gonna refer to those numbers, and so you'll need to match them up. Service providers also have ID numbers assigned to them called SPIN, Service Provider ID Numbers. Sometimes they may have more than one, so this is a tip for this.  However, if you're doing something new or different, double check to make sure what they want you to use. Sometimes they split up their business into different areas and they want you to use a different SPIN number for buying equipment or something or having construction done. So just a tip, double check with them to make sure what you should be using. Just like the 470, you'll get a receipt letter. You can make changes to it if you need to. You can adjust your funding request if you want to, but only reducing it. You can't increase the amount of money that you might want on changes to this. So when you're doing your 471, make sure you've got the amounts correct in there. This letter will also be dumped into your news items as well in your Epic account, so you can always look at it online in there. Now once your 471 is submitted, this is when you sit back and wait and your application goes into review. This is where now USAC staff will look at your application, make sure everything is correct, make sure you're submitting everything correctly, and this is where they will come to you with questions potentially. They may have to clarify something, they may want more information, they may want a copy of a bill, you never know. They may want to fix something for you. Some of those things that you didn't fix, they will notice this is people actually looking at, this is not automated, they will actually look at your form. This group in USAC is called Program Integrity Assurance, PIA, PIA Reviews, what you'll hear it called, those usually give you 15 days to answer. If you're having trouble getting back to them or you're on vacation or something, you can ask for an extension as well. If you do get any of these, you go into your 470 in your Epic account and there is a section where you can respond to inquiries. So what you'll receive is an email for your regular email account saying, I'm PIA reviewer so-and-so and I have question