The FCC’s Wireless Competition Bureau (Bureau) has denied a Petition filed by Northwest Fiber, LLC d/b/a Ziply Fiber (Ziply) requesting waiver of the Connect America Fund (CAF) performance testing support recovery requirements in the FCC’s rules. Ziply asserted that it “inherited” an aging Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)-based network with a faulty line card from Frontier in May 2020, and that such faulty line card caused Ziply to fail the CAF latency testing requirements in the fourth quarter of 2021. Ziply argued that granting a waiver would be in the public interest because Ziply had demonstrated reasonable efforts to comply with the rules, and that supply chain issues caused hardship in solving the network issues. The Bureau has concluded that although Ziply may have experienced supply chain issues, the testing failures that occurred were not out of Ziply’s control and were mostly a result of Ziply’s failure to properly maintain and monitor its network. Thus, the Bureau has found that granting a waiver for the circumstance of hardship is not warranted.
