The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) next step in closing the digital divide. On October 22, 2020, Phase I of the RDOF auction (auction 904) will take place, targeting over six million homes and businesses in census blocks that currently have little or no broadband access. Phase II will follow shortly thereafter, addressing homes that are partially served or not funded in Phase I. The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund consists of a reverse auction where rural ISP broadband providers bid down the cost of yearly support funding to serve areas with speeds less than 25/3 Mbps.

RDOF 2020: The Challenges

For operators, it’s been a challenge to determine a bidding strategy based on all of the uncertainties surrounding the auction bidding areas. RDOF has become increasingly complex due to:

• Lack of accurate coverage maps
• Changing technologies
• State and other federal programs
• Relatively non-stop expansion by existing new-market entrants

Cooperative Network Solutions’ Answer to the RDOF Auction Challenge Process

Over 280,000 census blocks have been challenged in the recent RDOF challenge/comment period. Although some operators didn’t share their full list of census blocks offered for the challenge, the majority did. As such, Cooperative Network Services (CNS) has run with that data, mapping as many of the RDOF challenged census blocks that were easily extracted from the submissions. From the census block IDs, an interactive map was created, and it’s now available to any operator considering participating in the auction.

Paul Solsrud, CNS Product Manager, says of the interactive RDOF Challenged Census Block map created by CNS:

“As we put this map together, the concerns some industry experts outlined have become more and more obvious. I think the FCC is in a tough spot regardless of how they move forward – either they take the word from all of these providers and risk pushback on spending a bunch of money when hundreds of thousands of blocks are being updated with very little public funding, all while using data that many are skeptical of, or they pushback on the carriers which could get ugly, not to mention could take an extremely long time.”

As the RDOF research process got underway, it became clear pretty quickly that carriers would need a way to visualize the challenged census blocks so they could appropriately plan for the auction.

For subscribers to the CNS Broadband Operations Map App, the RDOF census block data has been added as a feature layer, so there are popups on each block with the added ability to extract data.

The free RDOF Challenged Census blocks can be found here:https://www.cooperative-networks.com/rdof-challenge-map/

More details can be found in the Telecompetitor article here

If you’d like to learn how CNS can help you prepare for the upcoming RDOF auction, access a free version of our interactive map today. When you’re ready to purchase a full-scale version of our app, you can buy it online at any time.