Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

Spectrum announced the launch of Spectrum Internet, Mobile, TV and Voice services to more than 260 homes and small businesses in rural areas of Pike County (OH), with additional launches planned across the county. Spectrum’s multi-year rural construction initiative is driven by more than $7 billion in private investment from the company and will ultimately add an additional 100,000+ miles of fiber-optic network infrastructure and deliver symmetrical and multi-gigabit speed internet access to more than 1.7 million new locations across the country.

Federal law seeks to make communications technology like telephones and the internet, in the words of one older statute, “available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States.” A longstanding federal program that seeks to implement this goal is now before the Supreme Court, in a case known as FCC v. Consumers’ Research, and the stakes could be enormous.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-MO), in partnership with Missouri Farm Bureau President Garrett Hawkins, directed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, urging it to rightfully return defaulted funding through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to Missouri to expand broadband and rural internet access. The letter follows the recent reveal that the RDOF will not connect 85,000 Missouri service locations, and Missouri will lose approximately $177 million in federal investment. Attorney General Bailey urges “that action be taken by the FCC to rightfully return previously

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Managing Director (OMD) announces that the proposed universal service contribution factor for the second quarter of 2025 will be 0.366 or 36.6 percent. Contributions to the federal universal service support mechanisms are determined using a quarterly contribution factor calculated by the FCC. The FCC calculates the quarterly contribution factor based on the ratio of total projected quarterly costs of the universal service support mechanisms to contributors’ total projected collected end-user interstate and international telecommunications re

Conexon Connect, the internet service provider formed by rural fiber broadband leader Conexon, continues to extend access to high-speed internet across rural America.

Regardless of the final form it ends up taking, the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program is poised to play a key role in addressing rural connectivity. But the rural access divide isn’t the only issue we need to worry about, according to New Street Research Policy Analyst Blair Levin.

The House Communications and Technology Subcommittee met on March 5 in a hearing titled "Fixing Biden’s Broadband Blunder." Republicans on the panel seem most focused on concerns raised by states and broadband providers about the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Established by Congress in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the BEAD Program is distributing $42.45 billion to states to provide grants for last-mile deployment in unserved and underserved areas.

A broadband company promised to bring high-speed internet to many Michigan residents and businesses and then left them in the lurch. In 2024, Kansas-based Mercury Broadband defaulted on federal grant obligations and relinquished more than 60,000 locations across the state, said Eric Frederick, who heads the Michigan High Speed Internet Office. Mercury will not be completing the vast majority of the internet buildout projects.

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.

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.