Nearly half of CAF II auction bidders (103 out of 220) won funding, according to data about CAF II auction winners released by the FCC today. That means most entities won relatively low funding amounts. Just over 100 entities will share $1.488 billion, to be distributed over 10 years.
A handful of entities won funding of $100 million or more – including AMG Technology Investment Group, which won $281.3 million; Wisper ISP, which won $220.3 million, Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium, which won $186 million; and satellite broadband provider Viasat, which won $122.5 million.
CAF II Auction Winners
Several publicly held companies – including Verizon, Frontier, Cincinnati Bell, Otelco and Hawaiian Telcom – won no more than $18 million apiece. Other winners included rural local exchange carriers, wireless internet service providers and others.
Companies that qualified to bid in the CAF II auction but that did not win any funding include Cox Communications and Windstream.
An FCC map showing winning areas shows some relatively large geographic regions with no winners. It also shows that winning bids included a mixture of entities that bid to provide service at various broadband speeds – from as low as 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream to as high as 1 Gbps. Winning bids included bidders that said they would provide lower-latency services, as well as those who pledged to provide higher-latency services.
According to an FCC press release, which includes a complete list of auction winners:
- 53% of all homes and business served with support from the auction will have broadband at download speeds of at least 100 Mbps available to them
- 19% will have gigabit service available
- more than 99% will have service at speeds of at least 25 Mbps available
The CAF II auction concluded last week. Winning bidders offered to provide service in parts of 20 states where the nation’s largest price cap carriers rejected funding initially offered to incumbents. Winners were those who said they would offer service at the lowest level of Universal Service Fund support, with bids weighted to favor those offering to provide higher-speed, lower-latency services and no one allowed to request more funding than was initially offered to the incumbent.
Updated with additional information
