CAF II auction will begin July 24 and award nearly $2 billion over 10 years
The Federal Communications Commission has approved 220 bidders to participate in the upcoming Connect American Fund II auction, aimed at expanding rural connectivity by awarding up to $1.98 billion over 10 years to help defray the costs of deployment for wired and wireless networks in unserved areas.
The CAF auction (aka auction 903) will begin July 24, with a mock auction for participants on July 18-19. The FCC has said that nearly 1 million homes and businesses are in unserved areas that are eligible for for support from the auction.
The full list of qualified bidders included dozens of rural wireline and wireless service providers and satellite companies, with familiar players including Verizon Communications, Cincinnati Bell, Cox Communications, DoCoMo Pacific (an NTT DoCoMo subsidiary that serves the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), Windstream, Viasat and Hughes Network Systems.
The auction bidders are not the only recipients of CAF II funds; in 2015, 10 operators were awarded CAF II funds to deploy and maintain service in high-cost, mostly rural areas of some states. AT&T has been a recipient of CAF II funding outside of the auction process and expects to have deployed internet and voice service to 1.1 million “mostly rural” homes and small businesses by the end of 2020, with work having started in 2017 in Georgia. The FCC has since changed tactics and will be making awards on the basis of competitive bids via the auction process.
In its final rules for the auction, the FCC said that “Auction 903 will be the first auction to award ongoing high-cost universal service support using a multiple-round, reverse auction. Through this auction, we intend to maximize the value the American people receive for the universal service dollars we spend, balancing higher-quality services with cost efficiencies. Therefore, the auction is designed to select bids from providers that would deploy high-speed broadband and voice services in unserved communities for lower relative levels of support.” Bidding rounds will be held every other day once the auction begins.
