5G Fund: How many locations will be eligible for this $9 billion program for rural 5G?

As all of us have focused on the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program to bring fixed broadband to rural areas, the Federal Communications Commission has quietly moved another program forward: the proposed “5G Fund for Rural America”, a program that could be as large as $9 billion. As of March 2024, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel circulated to colleagues a draft order that would restart the 5G Fund. (INCOMPAS, out of concern for high USF funding, has proposed postponing the program by several years.) This would be a reverse auction (similar to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) where carriers would bid against each other in successive rounds, with the FCC trying to find the carrier willing to provide 5G at the lowest cost. One of the biggest issues in the docket was clearly the definition of eligible areas. The FCC appears to want to define eligible areas as only those without any coverage, while other stakeholder pushed for eligible areas to be anything without 5G coverage.