The term technology neutral has been around for a number of years related to federal grants. The first program that included the term that I remember was RDOF, although it likely was used earlier. The term is used among the folks who create grant programs as a way to not dictate technology choices – any technology that can meet the requirements of a given grant program should be considered.

The term is taking on significant new meaning in the BEAD grant process. The BEAD legislation said that the BEAD program was supposed to be technology neutral. However, the NTIA adopted a principle that States should favor fiber whenever possible, while acknowledging that other technologies are going to be needed to reach everybody.

Interestingly, most States did not need to be prodded in the direction of fiber. State broadband programs that were in place before BEAD largely favored fiber, even though some funding was made to other technologies like fixed wireless. If you examine the grant awards made by States from the Capital Project Funds, the large majority of awards went to fiber.

It makes sense that States have favored fiber because that’s what they’ve heard from elected officials around their state. I’ve worked with dozens of counties in the last few years, and every one of them is hoping to get rural fiber. They have become convinced that this is the technology that will carry them for the next fifty years.

It’s not hard to understand the reasons for the preference for fiber. If we go back even a few years, preferring fiber was clearly the best goal for most counties. Fixed wireless technology has gotten magnitudes better in the last few years, but the radios that were available five years ago did not compare well to the capability of fiber. FWA cellular wireless is also new to the rural market and didn’t exist before a few years ago. Nobody took satellite broadband seriously a few years ago because almost every part of the country had long waiting lists for folks hoping to get satellite service.

It’s clear that the new head of the NTIA is going to eliminate the NTIA’s preference for fiber. The NTIA had already started down that road over the last half year in making it easier for States to make BEAD awards to alternate technologies.

The question that every State broadband office is getting tired of being asked is if they are still going to be allowed to make awards to build fiber, and if so, under what parameters. Will the NTIA dictate specific rules for choosing fiber or will it modify the guidelines on how to evaluate alternate technologies?

There will be a lot of pushback from States if they can’t build much fiber, because governors and state officials have been promising to build as much fiber as possible. A large number of counties have made local matching grants to ISPs that are proposing to build fiber.

To a large degree, any significant change that limit the amount of fiber that will be built by BEAD feels like a political decision more than a policy decision. That’s interesting because the biggest recurring theme I’ve witnessed in the push for better rural broadband is that it has been nonpartisan everywhere. I remember being at a County Board meeting five years ago when the Board members joked that it was a pleasure to finally be working on a topic where they all agreed.

Nobody knows how BEAD will change. There are parts of the program that every ISP would like to see changed. However, there are a lot of county and state officials hoping to see fiber being funded, as was done in the recently announced awards in Louisiana.