In an effort to promote the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which is on the Commission’s January 30 meeting agenda, Chairman Ajit Pai released a list of 25 states with approximately 100,000 locations that would be potentially eligible for RDOF Phase I funding. Phase I would target $16 billion of the total $20.4 billion RDOF budget to wholly unserved areas (i.e., lacking 25/3 Mbps broadband service) using Form 477 coverage data, which has come under scrutiny as being inaccurate. Indeed, RDOF Phase II eligibility will be based on new granular broadband map data to be collected in the FCC’s new Digital Opportunity Data Collection.
