From an ISP perspective, the BEAD grant program has progressed at a glacial scale. The BEAD grants were signed into law on November 15, 2021, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The general anticipation is that it would take a year before State Broadband Offices would begin seeing the first 20% of funds and could begin awarding grants. Folks in the industry assumed that BEAD would follow a timeline similar to the earlier grants that were awarded using federal CARES and ARPA funding.

Certainly, the entire vendor community thought grant awards would start in 2023 with construction already underway this year. Fiber and electronics vendors cranked up production to meet the expected rush of orders. Construction contractors started freeing up slots in their work plans to accommodate BEAD grants. And then nothing happened.

The BEAD process got bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy. The reliance on the new FCC maps has been a complete boondoggle, and the maps are still terrible in many ways. The NTIA required states to write extensive grant and policy manuals which were never required for earlier state grant programs. The paperwork process for states has been numbing.

So here we sit 28 months after the announcement of the grant program and no grant money has flowed to states. Communities who heard about possible federal broadband grants at the end of 2021 are still waiting for the grant process to start and much of the public now believes these grants will never happen.

What is most mind-boggling is that BEAD is part of an infrastructure program, and the whole point of the IIJA was to spend money quickly to improve infrastructure and spur the economy. There has been pressure from the White House since the beginning to get the BEAD money spent and broadband networks under construction.

After the delays and endless paperwork, States will now be under tremendous pressure to award the grants and quickly shove the money out the door. It’s scary to look at the proposed timelines in most states. Some States are proposing steps like announcing the geographic boundaries where they will accept grants and then expect grant applications a month later. ISPs will have to somehow scramble to determine the cost and economics to build to specific geographic boundaries in a timeline that most will not be able to meet. This one requirement will be the final straw for many ISPs since they can’t get the engineering and business plans done that quickly. Even the giant ISPs are going to get overwhelmed by the proposed short timelines.

If there is any one part of a grant program where the process should be careful and deliberative, it’s the process of choosing grant winners. States are now expected to rush through that process and award grants as soon as possible this year.

This is ironic in a program where the NTIA took a lot of slow and deliberate steps to craft policies that would shield them from states making bad grant awards. But it’s almost guaranteed that State Broadband Offices are going to make big mistakes when rushing through grant applications from ISPs that they really don’t know. Anybody who has ever reviewed grant applications knows that every application paints a picture of an ISP that walks on water, and it’s not easy for inexperienced reviewers to distinguish good proposals from shoddy ones. A fast award process means less time for due diligence.

Even after States pick winners, there is a huge amount of work to do before construction can begin. Some State broadband offices have a ponderous process for negotiating and approving contracts with grant winners. I’ve seen examples where this process took almost a year. Once a grant contract is in place, many BEAD grants will require that time-consuming environmental studies be performed before any work can begin.

There might be a few tiny BEAD projects that will start construction before the end of this year. If so, NTIA and politicians will make a big splash with ribbon cuttings to show that the BEAD process is working. But most BEAD award winners won’t be able to start design engineering and order materials until 2025. Then, the giant industry crush that everybody feared will begin. Vendors will get overwhelmed with orders, and we’ll suddenly hear stories of supply chain issues again.

I always expected that the States would be under very different timelines, which would have strung out the impact on the industry over several years. But every grant office is now using the same starting gun, and all are going to race to get grants awarded at the same time.

As many have already predicted, a hurried process this year will make it even easier for State Broadband Offices to take the safe pick and award money to the giant, well-known ISPs. Giving large grants to big companies means fewer contracts to negotiate and a lot less paperwork. The pessimist in me wonders if this has been the plan all along.