I have been critical of the RDOF awards for a number of reasons, but one of the worst problems isn’t being discussed. When the FCC picked the eligible areas for the RDOF awards, there was no thought about whether the grant award areas make any sense as a service area for an ISP. Instead, the FCC picked Census blocks that met a narrow definition of speed eligibility without any thought of the nearby Census blocks. The result is that RDOF serving areas can best be described as a checkerboard, with RDOF serving areas scattered in with non-RDOF areas.

The easiest way to show this is with an example. Consider the community of Bear Paw in western North Carolina. This is a community of 200 homes, 42 cottages, and 23 condominiums that sticks out on a peninsula in Lake Hiwassee. The community was founded to house the workers who originally built the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Nottley dam on the Hiwassee River. Today’s community has grown from the original cottages. As you might expect for a small town deep into Appalachia, the town has poor broadband, with the only option today being slow DSL offered by Frontier. Residents describe the DSL as barely functional. This is exactly the kind of area where the RDOF awards were supposed to improve broadband.

Below are two maps. The first is printed from the FCC’s RDOF maps – it’s a little hard to read because whoever created the map at the FCC chose a bizarre color combination. On the right is a more normal map of the same area. The red areas on the FCC map are the places where RDOF was claimed by an ISP. As you can see, in a community with only 265 households, the FCC awarded RDOF to some parts of the community and not to others.

The checkerboard RDOF award causes several problems. First, any ISP will tell you that the RDOF award areas are ludicrous – it’s impossible for an RDOF winner to build only to the red areas.

And that’s where the second problem kicks in. The RDOF award winner in Bear Paw is Starlink, the satellite company. Starlink is not going to be building any landline broadband. Unfortunately for Bear Paw, giving the award to Starlink makes no sense. All of the lots in Bear Paw are in the heavy woods – that’s one of the attractions for living in the community. Everything I’ve read say that satellite broadband from Starlink and others will be sketchy or even impossible in heavily wooded areas.

The obvious solution if Starlink doesn’t work well is for the community to try to find another ISP to build fiber to the community. But getting another ISP to build in Bear Paw won’t be easy. Other federal and state grant programs will not fund the red RDOF areas on the FCC map. Even should Congress pass the infrastructure bill, there might not be enough grant money made available to an ISP to make a coherent business case to build to Bear Paw. The FCC checkerboard awards significantly curtail any future grant funding available to serve the community.

The shame of all of this is that any other grant program would have brought a real solution for Bear Paw. With most grants, an ISP would have proposed to build fiber to the entire community and would have applied for the grant project to make that work. But the RDOF awards are going to make it hard, or impossible to ever find solutions for the parts of the checkerboard that the RDOF left behind.

By spraying RDOF awards willy-nilly across the landscape, the FCC has created hundreds of places with the same situation as Bear Paw. The FCC has harmed Bear Paw in several ways. It first allowed a company to win the RDOF using a technology that is not suited to the area. Why wasn’t Starlink banned from bidding in wooded parts of the country? (Or an even better question might be why Starlink was allowed into the RDOF process at all?)  Since no other grants can be given to cover the RDOF areas, there will probably not be enough grant money available from other sources for an ISP to bring fiber to the community. Even if the federal infrastructure funding is enacted and the federal government hands out billions in broadband grant money, towns like Bear Paw are likely going to get left behind. How do you explain to the residents of Bear Paw that the FCC gave out money in a way that might kill their once-in-a-generation chance to get good broadband?