Thu, Dec 17th 2020 6:40am
Karl Bode
In West Virginia, incumbent telco Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. State leaders have buried reports detailing the depth of the grift and dysfunction, and, until a few years back, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest. The result has been about what you d expect: West Virginia routinely shows up as one of the least connected states in the nation.
Frontier has spent years taking taxpayer money then failing to adequately upgrade its network. So when the FCC recently threw another $9 billion in subsidies at the broken U.S. telecom sector, lawmakers like Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, were kind of annoyed to find Frontier again slated to get $371 million to expand broadband across eight states. $250 million was doled out to Frontier in West Virginia despit
As the dust settles around the first phase of the FCC s $9.2 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, one US Senator has taken aim at a longtime telecom provider and its plans to deploy 1Gbit/s services in West Virginia. The stakes are simply too high to provide nearly $250 million [for services in West Virginia] to a company that does not have the capability to deliver on the commitments made to the FCC, wrote Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, in a letter to the outgoing chairman of the FCC.
Capito argued that Frontier which won a total of around $371 million in RDOF money for rural broadband in eight states should not be trusted to use the cash to deploy gigabit services in her state.