Charter Returns Rural Digital Opportunity Funds in Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin

Charter Communications—through its affiliates Charter Fiberlink – Michigan LLC, Charter Fiberlink – Missouri, LLC, and Charter Fiberlink CCO, LLC—was awarded Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) funding to deploy gigabit-speed internet service in certain unserved areas of Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau Chief Trent Harkrader, Charter notified the FCC that it is returning some census block groups (CBGs) in Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin due to "unforeseen circumstances that are beyond Charter’s control." The CBGs returned represent less than 2 percent of the approximately 1.75 million new locations to be reached through Charter’s rural construction initiative and approximately 2.4 percent of Charter’s RDOF locations. Due largely to unforeseeable costs, primarily costs associated with the need for extensive utility pole replacements, deploying broadband in these few specific CBGs has become uneconomical, according to Charter.