The FCC has rebuked Kansas-based Mercury Broadband for attempting to avoid $25 million in penalties tied to its default on more than 92,000 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) locations. The agency said Mercury’s actions may have delayed broadband deployment for tens of thousands of Americans in high-cost areas, calling the company’s waiver request unjustified. Dismissing Mercury’s plea, the FCC argued it would be “unfair and inequitable” to alter the penalty calculation, using the provider’s own reasoning against it.
“At the outset,” the FCC said in its filing, “Mercury could have chosen not to seek funding through this program if it disagreed with the support recovery rules. To the extent an entity believed that the support recovery was unreasonable or disproportionate for RDOF post authorization defaults, the time to challenge the support recovery rules was when those rules were adopted, prior to bidding in the auction and long before filing a post-auction long-form application for support.”
The FCC said Mercury “knew the consequences” for defaulting and waited until right before the May 2025 deadline for making the support recovery payments for the states.
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