Windstream fights to change broadband stimulus rules

“I was so damn disappointed with it,” Jeff Gardner, Windstream’s chief executive officer, said of the rules governing the federal broadband stimulus program. “We spent months working on this. We spent millions of dollars getting ready.

We knew in every county, every exchange, how much additional money we’d need to invest to make the economics work for us. For $15 million, we could have increased [broadband] addressability in Arkansas by like 10%...”