Joan Engebretson

Missouri was the first state to ask the Federal Communications Commission to return Rural Digital Opportunity Fund broadband funding awarded to providers in the state who later defaulted on their awards.

The New Jersey Office of Broadband Connectivity and its director, Vallary Bullard, answered 16 questions from Telecompetitor recently. Some highlights:

• OBC will determine and publish “Project Area Building Blocks." Potential subgrantees will have the flexibility to design their overall project area proposals by combining a set of PABBs.

Many stakeholders were shocked when it came to light that over a third of $9.2 billion in winning bids in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund broadband program were rejected after the Federal Communications Commission reviewed winning bidders’ long-form applications. And the tally of RDOF defaults isn’t complete yet. A Benton Institute analysis found that bids associated with nearly $112.8 million in additional RDOF funding are in default. The additional defaults represent nearly 1.9 million locations that had been expected to receive service.

Two more states — Michigan and Maine — are now accepting applications for funding in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband program. In addition, Colorado plans to begin accepting applications for the state’s second round of BEAD funding on January 27. Providers have until April 9 to apply for funding in Michigan, which has a total budget of over $1.5 billion in BEAD funding. The deadline to apply for funding in Maine, which has $272 million to award, is February 28. The deadline in Colorado’s second round is February 28.

BJ Tanksley has been the director of Missouri’s broadband office since 2022 and has lived and breathed rural broadband for even longer. Previously, Tanksley was director of state and local legislative affairs for the Missouri Farm Bureau, where he served on a committee that developed a proposal for a program that would cover some of the costs of deploying high-speed broadband in rural areas where it wasn’t available.

At last count, New Hampshire had about 31,000 unserved and underserved locations eligible for the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Matthew Conserva, New Hampshire’s broadband program manager, expects that number to drop considerably by the time the state starts taking applications for $197 million in BEAD funding allotted to it. The number of locations eligible for BEAD funding has been declining as deployments are made that were funded through various federal funding programs, Conserva said.

President-elect Donald Trump announced he will appoint current Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the next FCC chair. Here’s a few observations on what this is likely to mean for the telecommunications and broadband industry. Net Neutrality undoubtedly will be reversed again. Since its inception, it has come and gone, depending on which party is in the White House. A Republican commission under Carr could have another big impact that would be detrimental to big tech, according to a research note from Washington insider and National Broadband Plan author Blair Levin.

The state of Vermont has awarded all the broadband funds that it received through the federal Capital Projects Fund (CPF), said Rob Fish, deputy director for the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB). As a result of the construction, some previously unserved and underserved areas of the state won’t need funding through the rural broadband Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, according to Fish. VCBB awarded more than $184.5 million through its CPF-funded Broadband Construction Program, which was supplemented by funding raised by individual communities and network opera

Comcast is footing most of the bill for a $55 million broadband network buildout in Indiana for which the company also won funding from the state. The state of Indiana awarded Comcast several grants totaling about $9.4 million to cover some of the costs of the buildout in June. The remaining $45 million-plus will be covered by Comcast, the company spokesperson confirmed.  That’s around 83 percent of total project costs.

For Nevada, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband funding program will essentially be the third and final phase of a plan to make high-speed service available to everyone in the state, explained Brian Mitchell, broadband director for the Nevada Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology (OSIT). That final phase will be funded not only through the $417 million in BEAD funding coming to the state but also through other sources. Phase Three of the three-phase High-Speed Nevada initiative aims to make high-speed broadband available to the 53,000 unserv