Starry Inc. will no longer be a part of a national effort to expand broadband service into rural communities.
The Boston-based fixed wireless internet provider will default on its awards through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, per a public notice from the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday.
Starry was set to receive nearly $270 million for providing broadband service to areas in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The FCC wrote that Starry had previously been “ready to authorize in all states in which it had placed winning bids except for Mississippi.”
The company’s bid, made under the name Connect Everyone LLC, had previously been accepted by the FCC for its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The goal of this program is to bridge the digital divide in the U.S. by bringing high-speed, fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses that still lack it.
A Starry spokesperson said the company declined to comment on the FCC’s public notice.
On August 31, the FCC announced that Starry’s bids to deploy service over the next 10 years in underserved communities had been approved.
At the time, Chet Kanojia, Starry co-founder and CEO, said they were grateful for the FCC’s “thorough review of our application” and that they “look forward to beginning our deployments and bringing #HappyInterneting to more communities across the country.”
The FCC laid out the next steps for the accepted bids in its public filing, including the required stand-by letters of credit and bankruptcy code opinion letters from the company’s legal counsel for each state where they had a winning bid.
Yesterday in its public notice, the FCC wrote that Connect Everyone notified the commission that it “planned to default on all its winning bids.” The FCC also noted defaulted bids for Cal.net and GeoLinks. Meanwhile, the commission authorized hundreds of new winning bids through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. Most of these went to Texas-based Nextlink.
Starry went public via a reverse merger in March, despite stock volatility and a series of other companies halting their own SPACs around that time. At the time, Starry said it covered more than 5.3 million households across Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Denver and Columbus, Ohio.
Starry's stock is down 90% from March 8, when the SPAC deal was announced.
