Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau—in conjunction with the Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force and the Office of Economics and Analytics—authorize Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (Auction 904) support. For these winning bids, the FCC has reviewed the long-form application information, including the letter(s) of credit and Bankruptcy Code opinion letter(s) from the long-form applicant’s legal counsel.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it is ready to authorize more than $640 million through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to fund new broadband deployments in 26 states bringing service to nearly 250,000 locations. To date, the program has provided $4.7 billion in funding to nearly 300 carriers for new deployments in 47 states to bring broadband to almost 2.7 million locations.

Windstream has completed the first phase of deployment in Green County (KY) under the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) by bringing access to 109 locations in the city of Greensburg. An additional 409 homes will be given fiber access by the end of the year. The Green County RDOF award of $1.5 million will be supplemented by an investment of $2.3 million by Windstream. Windstream’s Kentucky RDOF commitment is to bring fiber to the home (FTTH) services to more than 15,700 addresses across the state during the next six years.

In addition to making unprecedented funding available for broadband, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also directed the Federal Communications Commission to study the impact of the new government broadband funding on the Universal Service Fund program. As part of this process, the commission asked stakeholders for their comments on this, and many of those comments – particularly those from service provider associations — had a common thread: The USF program will still be needed, but its contribution system needs reform.

Cable broadband operators are telling the Federal Communications Commission that it should not start making them pay into the Universal Service Fund, especially given the tens of billions of dollars in broadband subsidies the Biden Administration has offered up in COVID-19 and infrastructure laws.

The Rural Wireless Association noted that the Universal Service Fund is unsustainable as currently constructed. When the 1996 Telecommunications Act was signed into law, voice telecommunications ruled the day and was the primary service supported by the USF. Circumstances have since changed. An explosion of innovation pushed consumers to use more data and demand higher speeds and lower latency.

Free Press called on the Federal Communications Commission to reinvent its Universal Service Fund (USF) policies so that millions more people can afford the costs of connectivity in the United States. Free Press urged the FCC and Congress to redraft policies crafted in the late 1990s, and last overhauled more than a decade ago, to reflect the sector’s many changes. Free Press wrote, “the good intentions that fueled that effort are no longer a reliable blueprint in a fundamentally changed marketplace.

I’ve been wondering lately if some of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction winners are having second thoughts about accepting the RDOF awards. It’s amazing how much the broadband world has changed since the end of that auction in December 2020. It's gotten more expensive to build fiber projects over the last year. The cost of labor is an even bigger concern. New grants and new requirements, that did not exist at the time of the auction, also complicate the situation.

A lot of attention has been given to the sprawling fiber expansions announced by large operators like AT&T, Charter Communications and Frontier Communications. But there’s another rapidly growing cohort of companies quietly working to deliver broadband to some of the hardest to reach areas of the country: electric companies and cooperatives. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) CEO Jim Matheson said electric co-ops haven’t always been part of the broadband equation.

The Wireline Competition Bureau, in conjunction with the Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force and the Office of Economics and Analytics, authorized Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (Auction 904) support for 2,576 winning bids.