Windstream CEO “Skeptical” About Some RDOF Rural Broadband Funding Winners

Add Windstream CEO Tony Thomas to the list of those who have questioned whether some Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) winners will be able to deploy the networks they committed to building at the level of funding they won. Without mentioning names, he said some “new entrants” that won RDOF funding believe they can “do something the established carriers can’t do using technology and economics that simply aren’t in the marketplace.”

One of Windstream’s key concerns about gigabit fixed wireless, Thomas said, was that RDOF rules require winners to make service available throughout an entire census block. “We’re confident we can get one gigabit per second downloads through a large swath [of a census block], but topology makes it difficult to do that ubiquitously,” he explained, adding that RDOF rules specify penalties for not making service available to all locations in a census block. Thomas also expressed concerns about the ability of fixed wireless to support the upstream speed required for RDOF gigabit buildouts.

He also questioned the logic of allowing companies to bid in the auction before they were fully vetted. Only after the auction were winners required to submit a long-form application that requires more details about the companies’ capabilities and buildout plans. “It seems like it’s a little bit out of order,” he said. “We’re assessing [a company’s capabilities] post-auction.” He hopes that in the next phase of the RDOF auction, the FCC will do a better job of qualifying bidders. “We need to move more processes up front,” he said. One idea might be to require bidders to make a refundable deposit before participating in an auction, noting that spectrum auctions already have that requirement.