The FCC has repaid $3.08 billion to the US Treasury that was loaned to fund the agency’s “rip-and-replace” program, but telcos are still struggling to remove equipment from Huawei and ZTE from their networks.
The day before the FCC announced the early loan repayment this month, the agency granted deadline extensions to four more service providers that could not meet their removal, replacement and disposal (RRD) terms, according to a public notice.
Copper Valley Wireless, Country Wireless, NfinityLink Communications and Velocity Communications are the latest funding recipients to be given more time to complete the process, ranging from two to six months. They each pointed to supply chain issues as the main causes for delays.
The FCC approvals are “conditioned on enhanced reporting by the recipients to ensure they continue to make progress and will complete their RRD work within the extended term,” according to the public notice.
In June, the FCC granted deadline extensions to four other providers, Bristol Bay, Eltopia Communications, Mark Twain Communications and Skybeam (Rise Internet).
At that time, the agency noted that the funding issues that delayed the program early on had been resolved and that recipients have had time to overcome other delays. As such, the FCC said it expects recipients to complete their RRD work within the given timeframes “with no further extensions.”
Indeed, the $3.08 billion the FCC borrowed from the Treasury in March 2025 filled the rip-and-replace program’s funding gap. The FCC was able to pay it back earlier than expected due to the amount raised from the AWS-3 auction in June.
But supply chain issues are creating problems for telcos trying to complete the removal of Chinese equipment and receive reimbursement from the FCC program.
Factors beyond their control
The FCC only grants a rip-and-replace deadline extension when a recipient can prove the delays are caused by “factors beyond its control.” In the latest cases, as many before, various supply chain issues are to blame.
Copper Valley Wireless, which was given a four-month extension to December 8, 2026, said the last remaining work to do is installing and launching “two redundant packet data network (PDN) gateways that complete the core network.” But the equipment delivery was delayed “due to the difficulties of shipping to Alaska.”
Country Wireless received a two-month extension to November 8, 2026. It ran into difficulty with finding “certified crew” to work on five remaining tower sites. “Country Wireless asserts that the certified crew originally scheduled for these sites withdrew, and it then had to find a replacement crew. Country Wireless has since reached an agreement with a replacement certified crew, but that crew’s earliest installation availability is September 2026, after Country Wireless’s current deadline,” according to the FCC’s public notice.
NfinityLink Communications, which was granted a six-month extension, said it suffered delays caused by a ransomware attack as well as late delivery of equipment. It said the cyberattack pushed back its schedule by six weeks. Further, it “experienced significant delays in the delivery of critical generators and backup power systems” that “were the direct result of global supply chain disruptions,” according to the public notice.
Velocity Communications’ deadline was extended from August 6, 2026 to February 2, 2027. The service provider uses cells-on-wheels for part of its replacement network, but it said these are in short supply “due to demand from overlapping federal- and state-funded broadband deployment programs.”
More work to do on reimbursement
Tim Donovan, president and CEO of the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA), told Light Reading that he will be “smiling from ear-to-ear when I never have to say rip-and-replace again.”
Speaking ahead of the CCA’s annual conference in New Orleans this week, he said there was still more work to do with policymakers, particularly on reimbursement timeframes.
“We need to find ways to make the fund administrator more efficient. There’s a lot of funds that have been submitted and that are in holding patterns. We’re all for making sure that we’re protecting the fund against waste, fraud, and abuse. But at some point, you also need to make sure that things are moving forward,” he said.
“We still hear problems of permitting delays that are holding back the program [and] the lack of funds moving forward … It’s important to keep in mind that it’s a reimbursement program … You rip, you replace, you destroy, and you submit that work to the fund administrator to try and get reimbursed. And there’s some carriers that are in an extraordinarily tight position now because they’re having to float some of that while they’re waiting for the final reimbursements to be made along the way,” he added.
