Lumen Fully Exited from Rural Digital Opportunity Fund
The company said the 41,000 locations it handed back earlier this month were the last of its commitments.
WASHINGTON, June 18, 2025 – With its latest batch of defaults, Lumen is fully out of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, the company told the Federal Communications Commission Monday.
“As Commission staff are aware, on Friday, June 6, 2025, Lumen relinquished its remaining RDOF awards,” Stephanie Minnock, the company’s assistant general counsel, wrote in a filing. “Given this relinquishment, Lumen will not continue its efforts to meet the 40% RDOF milestone by the end of this year.”
The company handed back on June 6 more than 41,000 locations across eight states. Lumen had won more than $262 million to serve 77,257 homes and businesses in 20 states through the 2020 reverse action, all of which have now been handed back. It won the tenth largest sum of all bidders.
FROM SPEEDING BEAD SUMMIT
Panel 1: How Are States Thinking About Reasonable Costs Now?
Panel 2: Finding the State Versus Federal Balance in BEAD
Panel 3: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO Guidance
Panel 4: Building, Maintaining and Adopting Digital Workforce Skills
In handing back previous tranches of locations, Lumen had said rising deployment costs and inaccurate maps had contributed to its defaults. RDOF requires participants to serve every location in the census block groups they won, with provisions that allow for some increased support in the event a company finds more homes and businesses than expected in a given area.
The company said on June 6 it notified the relevant state broadband offices and Tribal governments it was pulling out and that the locations could be eligible for the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Those eligibility maps had been finalized in most states, but states will have to update their BEAD maps as part of a restructuring by the Commerce Department.
Those updated maps will have to include defaults on federal programs that came in by the date of the restructuring notice, which was also handed down on June 6.
RDOF awarded more than $9 billion for rural broadband in 2020, but more than $3 billion of that has been defaulted on. The large majority of those came before projects got underway, after the agency found companies couldn’t reasonably deliver the service they had committed to.
The FCC can and has fined companies for defaulting on RDOF commitments.
“Lumen reserves its right to seek relief from any penalties, including via waiver of the Commission’s rules, as well as its right to seek other relief as may be necessary,” the company wrote in its June 6 filing.
