The purpose of this blog is to inform the public about the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), the State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) program, and other broadband-related activities at NTIA. The blog and its commenting feature are also intended to increase citizen participation at NTIA – one of the objectives of the White House's Open Government Directive.

We encourage and would like to publish your comments, but we expect conversations to follow the conventions of polite discourse. Therefore, we won't post comments that:

• contain vulgar language, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive terms that target specific ethnic or racial groups
• promote services or products (non-commercial links that are relevant to the blog post or comment are acceptable)
• are far off-topic
• are political endorsements
• make unsupported accusations

We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above.

Reporters are asked to send questions to the NTIA Office of Public Affairs at press@ntia.doc.gov and refrain from submitting questions here as comments. Reporters' questions will be removed.

We recognize that the Web is a 24/7 medium, and your comments are welcome at any time. However, given the need to manage federal resources, we will generally moderate and post comments only during regular business hours. If you submit comments after hours or on weekends, we'll read and post them as soon as possible during business hours.

To protect your own privacy and the privacy of others, please do not include phone numbers or email addresses in the body of your comments.

This comment policy may be amended or modified in the future.

If you have questions about the comment policy or how we apply it, please don't hesitate to contact us at webmaster@ntia.doc.gov.