Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

Charter has now won $700 million in broadband funding since its big win in the 2018 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, said Jessica Fischer, the company’s chief financial officer. The funding will go toward buildouts to 300,000 locations, Fischer said. The gross cost of the buildouts for which Charter has won funding will be $1.7 billion, which suggests that Charter will contribute matching funds of about $1 billion for the builds. The buildout cost per passing to Charter will be $3,200, Fischer said. The company completed 68,000 subsidized rural passings this quarter, she noted

The Universal Service Fund Working Group seeks public comment on the future of the Universal Service Fund (USF). The goal of this working group is to create a bipartisan forum to guide education, awareness, and policy-making on the USF. The working group invited comments on ten questions related to money collected from telecommunications companies that is dedicated to fulfilling the goals of universal service.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that Wavelength's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) long-form application has defaulted. Wavelength’s defaulted bids are identified here.

Deployment cost estimates underlying winning Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) bids are no longer accurate, representatives for a coalition of RDOF winners told FCC officials on July 14. The representatives suggested several possible remedies, including providing additional funding and other ideas. In a letter summarizing the meeting, the coalition cited “massive and unprecedented increases in broadband deployment construction costs . . .

On June 12, 2023, Sens Roger Wicker (R-MS), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), and JD Vance (R-OH) wrote the Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seeking additional funding for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Phase I auction winners.

During a stop in Minnesota in June 2023, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo made a promise: The $652 million earmarked for Minnesota to help build infrastructure for rural high-speed internet would be enough to finally cover every part of the state. Is that true? It depends, it turns out, on how you define a finished job. When calculating who has access to proper broadband, the federal government counts much slower internet speeds compared to Minnesota’s definition.

American Association for Public Broadband Executive Director Gigi Sohn’s hope is that the incumbents that oppose community broadband will come to realize that there are better business opportunities for them to support the concept rather than fight it. For instance, they could have bid on the project in Bountiful City (UT), rather than use shadowy tactics to try and kill it. For decades, these incumbents have argued that taxpayer dollars should not be used to compete against their private investments. In response to that, Sohn said, “I’m sorry to laugh.

There is one mapping issue that unfortunately messed up the count of eligible passings for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants and that is going to be a real concern. Both T-Mobile and Verizon have activated rural cell sites that can deliver home broadband using licensed spectrum that can be 100/20 Mbps or a little faster.

How can we make the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding go as far as possible? The answer is that state grant plans need to be laser focused on how to generate competition and keep costs as low as possible. If we can do that, we stretch the BEAD dollars as far as possible. If we don’t, we run out of money. It’s really quite easy to construct this framework. We only need two pieces of data: the number of unserved and underserved locations, and what we pay to reach them.

Fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) provider GigFire has acquired Rural Comm, a service provider headquartered in Farina (IL). GigFire, which now operates in ten Midwestern states, was known as LTD Broadband until earlier in 2023.