Mercury Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Support Recovery Waiver Denial Order

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau denied Mercury Wireless Indiana, Mercury Wireless Kansas, and Mercury Broadband’s (collectively Mercury) request for waiver of the Commission’s rules, which governs the recovery of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) support when recipients do not fulfill the program’s buildout requirements. The Bureau finds that Mercury did not demonstrate that good cause supports reducing the required support recovery for Mercury’s RDOF defaults in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. Mercury originated in Kansas and provides broadband services in the Midwest using fiber and fixed wireless technologies. At the time of the RDOF auction, Mercury offered broadband service in Indiana and Kansas and was in the process of expanding service to Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. Mercury submitted a short-form application to participate in the RDOF auction and was found qualified to bid. Mercury then bid in the auction where it identified the areas where it would like to provide service meeting the RDOF obligations, the performance tier and level of latency at which it proposed to provide service, and the level of support it would need to offer voice and broadband service meeting the relevant performance obligations. Mercury outbid other auction participants and won over $68 million in RDOF support to serve over 167,000 model-estimated locations. Mercury then assigned its Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio winning bids to its subsidiary Mercury Indiana and its Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri winning bids to its subsidiary Mercury Kansas.  Mercury Indiana and Mercury Kansas filed long-form applications seeking to be authorized to receive support for the winning bids in exchange for the deployment of voice and broadband to locations their assigned states. Had Mercury not submitted these winning bids, other carriers would have won support to serve the area, and if authorized, would have had the obligation to serve either 40% or 60% of the required number of locations by the end of 2025. After receiving more than $14 million in high-cost monthly support payments for over two years, in a series of letters in October and November 2024, Mercury officially notified the Bureau that it was completely withdrawing from RDOF in Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri, and that it would not fulfill its RDOF obligation to serve certain census block groups (CBGs) covering over 64,000 model-estimated locations in Indiana and Michigan collectively. In December 2024, Mercury officially notified the Bureau that it would not fulfill its RDOF obligation to serve more than 14,000 model-estimated locations in Ohio, identifying the CBGs it would not serve. In these letters, Mercury stated that it would “no longer be entitled to receive further RDOF support for the surrendered CBGs and that it may be subject to applicable non-compliance rules.” Mercury remains obligated to serve more than 30,000 model-estimated locations in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan collectively, and is continuing to receive monthly support disbursements to do so.