I’ve seen some vendors speculating that BEAD is finally going to unleash a big pile of spending in 2025. I don’t want to be the one to burst their bubble, but even if the BEAD grants continue to move on the current path, there will not be a big wave of construction from BEAD this year. All bets are off on BEAD spending if the new administration pauses or majorly reworks BEAD.

It’s easy to understand the renewed enthusiasm, because the BEAD process recently went into overdrive. The coming change of administration has loosened the paperwork at NTIA and there are a ton of states rushing to open grant portals. In most states, the timeline recently got shortened by at least a few months.

There is still a lot of paperwork to get through before we see construction. The process for a State that is just now opening its BEAD portal is as follows:

• A State has to accept, evaluate, and tentatively accept grant applications. If there are locations not awarded in the first round, most states have already scheduled a second round of grants. The grant process doesn’t end until a grant office has an ISP willing to serve every BEAD-eligible location. While having satellite broadband in the mix can speed up this process, some states are going to want to use a second, or even a third round if their goal is to maximize fiber construction.
• Once a state has tentatively chosen an ISP to serve every location, it has to write a voluminous final report to the NTIA that describes, in detail, how the State followed the NTIA rules in making the grants. The NTIA recently relaxed the rules for writing this final report, but States still have to take the time to describe everything they did in the grant process.
• The final reports have to be sent to NTIA and be approved, and NTIA is going to need some time to review the reports – with likely a lot of new people.
• Next, the State broadband office has to finalize a contract with each ISP. NTIA has been encouraging states to negotiate contracts while the final report is pending. But contracts can’t be finalized until NTIA blesses the final report, and contracts would have to reflect any NTIA comments about the final report. Any actions by Congress or NTIA to relax the rules will definitely delay the contract process.
• The press release day comes when ISPs sign the contracts. Some ISPs will sign contracts quickly, but others will balk at some of the provisions in the State grant rules.

The press release day does not mean construction starts immediately. ISPs next have to proceed with environmental studies, start lining up rights-of-ways and easements, and doing field engineering along roads to get ready. Anybody building fiber on poles will have to get that process rolling, and it’s hard to envision that finishing quickly except in places where poles are nearly perfect – meaning not in rural America. Depending on the size of the grant, these activities could well take up much of 2025 for most grant winners. NTIA is encouraging ISPs to start these construction process before they have a signed contract, but I can’t envision any ISP willing to do that.

Construction can’t start until the environmental study has been approved, and I’ve been hearing rumblings that some parts of the country are going to see a backlog of environmental scientists who are also doing similar studies for roads, bridges, and dams approved by the same giant pile of federal money.

States with seasonal construction due to winter weather will have a particularly hard time starting any meaningful as we reach the end of 2025.

One issue that will flummox vendors is that some states have announced a painfully slow process for reimbursing ISPs for construction costs. ISPs in that kind of environment are not going to rush to pre-buy materials if they won’t reimbursed until construction is completed.

This is not to say that there won’t be some construction done in 2025, but it is not going to be the floodgate the vendors are hoping for. The doors should be wide open for spending in 2026 and 2027, when most of the BEAD money will be spent.

I’ve always predicted that no more than perhaps 5% of the BEAD money will be spent in 2025, although the current rush to get grants awarded could goose that little higher. I can already hear the booing from every vendor reading this – but there doesn’t look to be any easy way to get the plows in the ground.