Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

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.

In 2022, Jeff Churchwell made history. As the general manager of Winnsboro-based Northeast Louisiana Power Cooperative (NELPCO), Churchwell led the initiative to become the first Louisiana electric cooperative to provide broadband for its members. NELPCO serves seven parishes in northeast Louisiana: Franklin, Madison, Richland, Tensas, East Carroll, West Carroll and Morehouse. With Campbell on board, construction for Volt Broadband began by June. As of April 2023, Volt Broadband has 930 active customers and installs eight to 10 new customers every day.
 

Some 8,200 homes, businesses and schools in unserved and underserved parts of Lumpkin County (GA) will, for the first time, be eligible for high-speed fiber internet. The $20.4 million project, to provide fiber broadband to Dahlonega and throughout the county, is expected to be completed in 2024. It is a result of a public–private partnership between the county and Kinetic. The county will use about $6.9 million in state grant money from the federal government.

Spectrum announced the launch of Spectrum Internet, Mobile, TV and Voice services to more than 300 homes and small businesses in Newberry County, South Carolina. Spectrum’s newly constructed fiber-optic network buildout in Newberry County is part of the company’s approximately $5 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)-related investment in unserved rural communities, which includes $1 billion won in the Federal Communications Commission’s RDOF auction.

Since Phase I of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) concluded, it has become more expensive to deploy broadband due to rampant increases in construction materials, equipment, and labor costs. Given the challenges, RDOF winners—especially smaller providers—are facing, we appreciate your review of the following options:

The Federal Communications Commission originally budgeted $20.4 billion dollars for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) subsidy program to be spent over ten years. The original RDOF reverse auction offered $16 billion in subsidies. But in a story that is now well known, some entities bid RDOF markets down to ridiculously low subsidy levels, and only $9.4 billion was claimed in the auction. $2.8 billion of this funding ended up in default, including some of the bidders who had driven the prices so low. That means that only $6.4 billion of the original $20.4 billion has been allocated.