RDOF Winner Coalition Still Hopes for Additional Funding Due to Increased Costs

A group known as the Coalition of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Winners is still hoping that the Federal Communications Commission will release additional funding to the companies to help cover the large increases in deployment costs that the winners have experienced since the RDOF rural broadband funding auction was completed in 2020, just prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. One of the companies seeking extra funding is Aristotle Broadband, which won $62 million in the auction for deployments primarily in Arkansas and Mississippi, including persistent poverty counties. Although RDOF winning bidders were announced in 2020, the FCC did not authorize some winners until 2022. In Aristotle’s case, authorization came 18 months after the winning bidders were announced, said Aristotle Broadband CEO Elizabeth Bowles. By that time, Bowles said, the pandemic had hit and “inflation was out of control.” According to Bowles, we have gone from “where RDOF covered 40 to 45% of build costs to now covering 20 to 25% of the cost.” The Coalition of RDOF Winners argues that the FCC should be able to make additional funding available for RDOF winners the commission has only approved a small portion of the $20.4 billion that was budgeted for the RDOF program.