Redzone flags $500,000 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund funding mix up

Maine-based fixed wireless access (FWA) provider Redzone Wireless followed Charter Communications in seeking a waiver from commitments made in the Federal Communication Commission’s recent Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction on the grounds its promised deployments would be redundant. In December 2020, Redzone won $507,752 in RDOF support to cover 755 locations in its home state with broadband service. However, the company said in a filing with the FCC it wants to relinquish the funds after discovering its service would be in competition with “an existing municipally-funded symmetric gigabit network.” Redzone said the census blocks it won at auction “never should have been” considered eligible to receive RDOF funding but were included in the proceeding due to the local provider’s failure to report its gigabit coverage. It added it discovered the areas were already covered during the auction and “immediately stopped bidding” on those blocks, but noted a bid entered before it made the finding ended up winning. It asked the FCC to release it from its RDOF coverage commitments, arguing that accepting the money would “be a waste of taxpayer contributions and contravene Commission objectives designed to steer finite support to areas that actually lack service.”