Doug Dawson reports on the state of RDOF…

The FCC originally budgeted $20.4 billion dollars for the 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. The question I’m asking today is what the FCC will do with the remaining $14 billion.

There were some high points and some low points…

To be fair, the RDOF is doing some good things. A lot of electric coops, telephone coops, telephone companies, and independent fiber overbuilders are building networks using the RDOF subsidy as the basis for getting funding. Charter and a few other larger ISPs are building networks using the RDOF funding.

But the RDOF awards also left behind a lot of messes. First, it took too long to eliminate the default bidders. Areas claimed by these bidders were off-limits to other federal grants and most state grants – many of these areas would have fiber today had they not been in RDOF limbo.

In Minnesota the low point when LTD Broadband was qualified and then disqualified from the bids. It meant large swaths of Minnesota were ineligible for other grants and are still waiting. And in the end, I’ve heard many people say, better to leave the money on the shelf than leave these communities in limbo even longer or worse, come out the other end without better broadband. Doug has a solution that I hope folks will hear…

Now that the states have broadband offices, the easiest way for the states to award the remaining RDOF billions would be to let state broadband offices do the heavy lifting. It would be one more tool for state broadband offices – that hopefully would not follow the complicated BEAD rules. The worst possible way to use the money would be for the FCC to take some easy path to shovel the money out the door again – please don’t give us RDOF II!