A rocky road lies ahead for RDOF as money drains away

With all the buzz around what will and won’t happen to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, it’s easy to forget the government’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is chugging along – albeit on a road rife with defaults and rural areas left behind. As of 2025, internet service providers (ISPs) have defaulted on $3.3 billion of the $9.2 billion total in RDOF awards, according to a study from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Meaning 1.9 million of approximately 5.2 million eligible RDOF locations are no longer scheduled to receive service. The Benton Institute analyzed recently published Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data that broke down RDOF defaults by state and ISP. States like California and Massachusetts have a whopping 94 and 89 percent of RDOF awards in default. And in New Jersey’s case, 100 percent of its RDOF funding is in default, so none of the state’s eligible RDOF locations will be connected. Among ISPs, the ones with the highest tally of defaulted locations are Starlink (whose bids the FCC rejected in 2022) with 629,831, LTD Broadband (528,088), Mercury Wireless (122,645) and Connect Everyone (108,506).