Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Clock is Ticking on 5 Big Winning Bidders, Will it Run Out?

It’s been 18 months since the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction was completed and the Federal Communications Commission has not yet released funding for five of the top 10 winning bidders. It’s beginning to look like that isn’t going to happen, considering that the other five top winning bidders have had all or most of their funding released, as have scores of smaller winners. The FCC typically releases a ready-to-authorize list of RDOF winning bidders every month and recently those lists have had only a small handful of smaller bidders on them. The top 10 winning bidders in the RDOF auction were collectively slated to win about three-quarters of the $9.2 billion tentatively awarded in the auction. Auction rules called for funding to go to the company that committed to deploying service in an area for the lowest level of support, with a weighting system favoring bids to deploy higher-speed service. The five large winning bidders that have not yet had funding released have received criticism for a variety of reasons. “The FCC appears to have very significant questions” about the five bidders, said Blair Levin, policy analyst for New Street Research. “It’s not that they lied or misrepresented themselves,” Levin continued. “But the commission doesn’t appear to have confidence that those enterprises will do what they said they would do.”