RDOF Defaults

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was the biggest attempt at the time to solve the rural broadband gap. The Federal Communications Commission had originally slated $20.4 billion to award to internet service providers in a reverse auction, meaning the ISP willing to take the smallest subsidy for a given area won the funding. Winners were to collect the funding over 10 years and had up to seven years to build the promised networks. The program ran into problems in several dramatic ways. First, the FCC chose the areas eligible for RDOF using its badly flawed broadband maps. In a problem that is still plaguing the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment process, the FCC made the funding available in what is best described as a checkerboard of eligible and non-eligible areas. At the close of the BEAD auction, ISPs had claimed over $9.2 million in RDOF subsidies to serve over 5.2 million locations. The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society has assembled a spreadsheet that shows that 1.9 million of those locations and $3.3 billion were defaulted.