During our January 8 Executive Committee meeting, Tom Reid, broadband consultant for Buckeye Hills Regional Council and the Buckeye Hills Foundation, provided an in-depth analysis of the FCC’s recently completed Phase 1 Auction for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which in December awarded $170 million to carriers across rural Ohio to extend service to 191,093 unserved homes and businesses over the next 10 years.
Reid gave an overview of the current state of broadband in southeast Ohio and the potential impacts of the $38,530,483 awarded to carriers to provide service to 39,507 households in the Buckeye Hills region.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Successful bidders in the region included
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Charter/Spectrum
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Mercury Wireless
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Connect Everyone
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LTD Broadband
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NexTier.
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- Each provider indicated they would be providing primarily gigabit speeds over fiber under the terms of their awards.
- The $170 million awarded in Ohio represents roughly 20% of the $840 million subsidy the FCC had set aside for the Phase 1 Auction, raising the question of whether the winning providers will be able to successfully deploy fiber-to-the-home and meet the deployment milestones specified by the FCC.
- Questions also remain as to whether the RDOF Phase 1 awards will preclude the awarded census blocks from receiving funding from other broadband programs.
- Despite the awards covering all available census blocks in the Phase 1 Auction, an additional 150,000 rural households would remain unserved, below 25/3 speeds.