Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is a federal Communications Commission (FCC) voice and broadband subsidy program funded by federal Universal Service Fund (USF) charges on telephone services.

The Department of Public Service (PSD) has prepared an interactive map that depicts the RDOF territories in Vermont.

On August 2, 2019, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposing to establish the $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to bring high-speed fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses lacking broadband service. On January 30, 2020, the Commission adopted the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Report and Order, which establishes the framework for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, building on the success of the CAF Phase II auction by using reverse auctions in two phases. On December 7, 2020, the FCC announced the winning bidders in 49 States and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The FCC prepared an interactive map that depicts the winners of the auction nationwide.

The auction awarded funds to each of five companies to deploy voice and broadband service to a specific territory defined as a collection of census block groups. The table below depicts the winners of the auction in Vermont. The first column lists the quantity of locations in the territory as estimated by the FCC modeling, based on census household records.  The second column lists the quantity of business and residential buildings in the territory found in the Vermont E-911 database. 

• Charter, docket 21-0041
• ECFiber, docket 21-0049
• Kingdom Fiber, docket 21-0045
• SpaceX (Starlink), docket 21-0018

The PSD has also prepared a printable PDF map of the RDOF territories in Vermont, and a table listing the quantities of locations in the award territories broken out by town. The GIS layers depicting the territories and locations shown in that Vermont map linked above are also available for independent GIS processing.