Definition of Universal Service
The Communications Act of 1934 first established the concept of making affordable basic telephone service available to everyone everywhere within a nation, state, or other governmental jurisdiction. This concept led to the formation of a fund known as the Universal Service Fund (USF), which was finally codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In some cases, the concept has been widened to include other telecommunications-information services, mainly Internet access.
Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Universal Service Fund (USF) operated as a mechanism by which interstate long distance carriers were assessed to subsidize telephone service to low-income households and high-cost areas in order to ensure that all the people in the United States have access to rapid, efficient, nationwide communications service with sufficient facilities at realistic charges.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 expanded the traditional definition of universal service - affordable, nationwide telephone service – to include other services, such as rural health care providers and eligible schools and libraries.
The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. Today the FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.
Read more about this topic: Universal Service Fund
Famous quotes containing the words definition of, definition, universal and/or service:
“It’s a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only definition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was “mine.””
—Jane Adams (20th century)
“According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals—just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)
“I have been maintaining that the meaning of the word ‘ought’ and other moral words is such that a person who uses them commits himself thereby to a universal rule. This is the thesis of universalizability.”
—Richard M. Hare (b. 1919)
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)