The FCC has published a detailed map of the upcoming RDOF grant program that is overlaid on Google Maps. This let’s everybody in rural America see if they might be getting covered by the $16 billion grants that will be awarded in October of this year. This is the largest broadband grant to ever be awarded and will serve only rural areas. You can zoom in on this map to see if your home or business will be covered by this giant grant program.

If it turns out your neighborhood is covered by this grant, here are a few things you should know:

• The money is being awarded by reverse auction with different ISPs competing for the money. The ISP willing to take the least amount of federal grants will win the award for your area. There is one twist on the auction in that any ISP offering gigabit speeds wins the grant after a few rounds of bidding.
• ISPs can use any technology that delivers at least 25/3 Mbps broadband to participate in the grant auction. The auction is weighted to try to give the money to faster technologies. However, the winner in your area could be proposing to use DSL, fixed wireless, satellite broadband, or fiber. The technology you will be served with is going to depend on the ISP that wins your area. You should be able to find out the technology that is coming to your neighborhood when the auction is finished sometime near the end of this year.
• You might not see a solution quickly. Winners will have 6 years to complete construction, meaning that some homes in the winning areas won’t get broadband until 2026. Since people are being asked to work and school from home, that’s a really long time to wait.
• If nobody wins the grant money in your area it would go back into the pot for a smaller $4 billion grant to be awarded in 2021.

What if you aren’t covered by these grants and don’t have good broadband? What are your chances of seeing a broadband solution?

It’s possible that your area would have been covered by the $1.5 billion reverse auction grants awarded last year. However, if your area was awarded one of these grants then hopefully you’ve already heard about it.

If you live really close to one of these RDOF areas, there is a chance that the winner of these grants might build to your home. However, that’s something that you aren’t likely to know for a long time, and the chances are not good that you’ll be covered.

There will be a second FCC auction in 2021 for $4 billion that will cover additional areas that are not on this map. $4 billion will cover a much smaller area than this map – but some folks will get a second chance. That auction is likely to have the same rules, meaning that you might not see a broadband solution until 2027. It’s likely that the FCC will issue a second map similar to this one for the areas covered by those grants.

There are other federal grant programs such as the ReConnect grants that are awarding smaller dollars. The ReConnect grant for this year is $300 million for the whole country and was boosted by $100 million in the COVID-19 stimulus package. There is no guarantee that this grant program will carry into the future – it’s been funded now for the last few years as part of the annual agriculture bill.

There are also state grant programs that might cover you. Most of the state grant programs are relatively small, but they are helping to spread broadband. However, there is a significant chance that a lot of state grant money will be used as matching funds for the RDOF grants.

If you have poor broadband options and you aren’t covered by this grant there is a good chance that you just got screwed. There are many millions of homes and business that don’t have good broadband that are not covered by this grant. That blame can be laid squarely on the FCC. The FCC is using information supplied by ISPs to define areas that are eligible for this grant. There are huge parts of rural America where the ISPs are falsely claiming to offer 25/3 speeds, and such areas are not included in this grant.

The FCC knows they are using faulty data and they decided to move forward with these grants anyway. The areas covered by the RDOF grants don’t have good broadband, but there is an even larger geographic area of the country that should be eligible for federal grants that have been shut out due to the FCC never insisting on good mapping data from ISPs.

If your neighborhood has poor broadband and isn’t covered by these grants, then you need to yell bloody murder to anybody and everybody. Complain to local, state and federal politicians. The fact is that if your neighborhood isn’t on these maps, or isn’t covered by a few other existing grant programs, then you are not likely to be getting broadband with federal grant assistance any time soon. You aren’t going to be alone and there are millions of other rural residents in this same situation – so join forces and shout until there is a solution.