The Remaining RDOF Funds

The Federal Communications Commission originally budgeted $20.4 billion dollars for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) subsidy program to be spent over ten years. The original RDOF reverse auction offered $16 billion in subsidies. But in a story that is now well known, some entities bid RDOF markets down to ridiculously low subsidy levels, and only $9.4 billion was claimed in the auction. $2.8 billion of this funding ended up in default, including some of the bidders who had driven the prices so low. That means that only $6.4 billion of the original $20.4 billion has been allocated. The question I’m asking today is what the FCC will do with the remaining $14 billion. It seems unlikely that there will ever be another RDOF-like reverse auction. RDOF was meant to bring broadband to areas that were unserved according to the FCC’s broadband maps at the time of the reverse auction – meaning areas where no broadband provider claimed broadband speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps. But since providers are able to claim marketing speeds under the FCC mapping rules instead of actual broadband speeds, many millions of unserved locations were left out of the RDOF process. Now that the states have broadband offices, the easiest way for the states to award the remaining RDOF billions would be to let state broadband offices do the heavy lifting.