Congress should spend an additional $9 billion over three years to speed broadband deployment, but the USF money should be enough to bring broadband to 99 percent of the U.S. population by 2020, said the FCC's Levin. Combined with $7.2 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for broadband deployment, the redirected USF program will pay for broadband deployment across the U.S., he said.

The $9 billion could be offset by spectrum auctions, an FCC official said.

John Muleta, CEO of M2Z Networks, questioned whether the USF money would be enough to meet the FCC's broadband deployment goals. In late 2009, an FCC task force said a nationwide broadband network would cost anywhere between $20 billion and $350 billion, he noted. The $350 billion figure was the estimate for a 100M bps nationwide network.

The cost to bring even sub-1M bps service nationwide could cost tens of billions of dollars, Muleta said. "That means everybody's paying higher phone bills in order to accomplish this," he said.

Successful.com's Settles said he hopes the redirected USF money won't go only to large broadband providers. The FCC needs to look to Google, which in February announced it would deploy 1G bps broadband service to several cities, he said.