The US Federal Communications Commission has proposed a new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, to provide another USD 20.4 billion for expanding broadband in unserved rural areas. The funding would be awarded in an auction to provide service of at least 25/3 Mbps, with extra incentives for higher speeds.
The proposal put out for consultation takes a similar form to the Connect America Fund (CAF) Phase II reverse auction held last year. The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund would focus on areas served by price cap carriers, along with areas that were not won in the CAF Phase II auction and other areas that do not currently receive any high-cost universal service support.
The new auction would raise the minimum speed for broadband deployment from the CAF’s 10 Mbps/1 Mbps to at least 25 Mbps/3 Mbps. In Phase I, with at least USD 16 billion, the fund would target wholly unserved census blocks, using existing FCC data. In Phase II, it would target unserved locations in partially unserved census blocks, using new, more granular data being developed, along with areas not won in Phase I.
The new data is part of another proposal from the FCC, called Digital Opportunity Data Collection. The regulator has been under fire for relying on inaccurate maps to award broadband funding. The new data collection would collect geospatial broadband coverage maps from fixed ISPs, helping to develop granular, high-quality maps. In addition, the FCC wants to try crowdsourcing, so the public can contribute to improving the maps.
