Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

The Trump administration revised the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program in June to shift from a fiber-focused program to a tech-neutral one prioritizing low costs.

What comes after Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program? While BEAD will build good broadband networks in a lot of rural communities, it’s becoming clear that BEAD is not going to solve a lot of the rural broadband gap. I start with the premise that rural communities are not going to be happy when somebody officially tells them that the federal government is giving money to Starlink or Kuiper to solve their rural broadband gap.

The Universal Service Fund, operated by the Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with the Universal Service Administrative Company, has grown old, expensive, and ineffective. It is past time for Congress to shrink, modernize, and retool it to address today’s broadband ecosystem. While the Supreme Court recently upheld the legal legitimacy of USF’s funding mechanism, the need to reform the program persists.

When it comes to federal efforts to close the digital divide, Minnesota has been left behind. Program after program has promised transformational change—yet time and again, your communities are still waiting. But Minnesota has the power—and the track record—to build its own broadband future. Federal broadband programs have failed the state. They promised a feast and delivered crumbs. In the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, ISPs defaulted on 80% of  more than $400,000,000 in state RDOF funds and on 78% of the over 142,000 RDOF locations.

Rural broadband executives told lawmakers that Congress must modernize the Universal Service Fund to keep small town networks affordable and sustainable. “USF doesn’t just cover network construction, but also ongoing operations, maintenance, and upgrades,” said witness Karen Jackson-Furman, CEO of West Kentucky and Tennessee Telecommunications Cooperative.

When Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in late 2021, inflation was still “transitory,” interest rates were near zero, and tens of millions of Americans lacked access to high-speed internet. Lawmakers warned that only a massive federal investment could close the digital divide.

The Supreme Court recently provided the Federal Communications Commission a sizable legal win by upholding its Universal Service Fund as constitutional.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau (Bureau) seeks nominations for the following Board member positions on the Board of Directors of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) listed below for a three-year term:

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

It’s welcome news that Big Tech is investing billions in AI infrastructure, but who’s really paying for the broadband networks that help make those AI investments profitable? That burden is increasingly falling on America’s aging Universal Service Fund, which since 1998 has supported broadband deployment in rural communities, low-income households, schools, libraries and hospitals. The fund is financed mostly by telephone subscriptions—many of them paid by seniors on fixed incomes.