We got a peek at how the BEAD grants might be modified when Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina introduced the Streamlining Program Efficiency and Expanding Deployment (SPEED) for BEAD Act. Note that these are just proposed changes to BEAD and other changes are not off the table. Many of these changes undo direct requirements from Congress in the original BEAD legislation.

A lot of the changes are largely cosmetic and what the regulatory world refers to as ‘packing peanuts’, meaning the changes make a policy statement but have almost no impact on making the BEAD grant awards. This includes:

• Changes the acronym for BEAD from ‘Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment” to ‘Broadband Expansion, Access, and Deployment’.
• Eliminating topics from the grant application that most ISPs were giving lip service to anyway. ISPs may still care about these topics, but they would no longer be a requirement for States to consider when choosing grant winners. This Act would eliminate consideration for:
  • Diversity, inclusion, and equity
  • A long list of labor requirements including an emphasis on union wages, prevailing wages, workforce composition, and a labor peace agreement.
  • How a new network would address climate change.
  • Grant points for offering open access.
  • Regulation of network management practices, including data caps.

The proposed legislation has a few items of more significant impact that most ISPs will like:

• Allows ISPs to remove high cost locations from BEAD proposals. Most states have drawn arbitrary required service areas, and this lets an ISP remove location that add too much cost. Presumably those locations would default to a satellite or some other technology.
• While BEAD would maintain the requirement to offer at least one low-cost broadband plan, states would not be allowed to regulate or otherwise mandate or set such rates or require rates to be capped or frozen for future years.

There are a few major proposed changes:

• Any unspent BEAD funds would be returned to Treasury. States will be pleased to see that the Act leaves Non-Deployment Funds alone – many feared those would be yanked. Originally, unused funds were to be redistributed to states that didn’t get enough funding. This is bad news for States that hoped to get more.
• One of the biggest changes is that BEAD funding can’t be used to fund digital inclusion and adoption activities. Funds can still be used for telecom workforce development.

The biggest change is the one we’ve all been waiting for – there would no longer be any preference for fiber, and any broadband technology that meets the speed and latency requirements is eligible for BEAD funding. Of course, this doesn’t answer the big question of what that means. Might this mean that 10% or 20% of BEAD would go to satellite technology, or even most or all of it? As much as folks want an answer to this question, it’s likely to be a while until rules get that specific. That final direction is likely to come from the NTIA in the form of new instructions on how to choose grant winners.

While the proposed Act has the acronym SPEED, it seems inevitable that any changes by Congress or NTIA will require states that have already made BEAD awards, or the many that are currently scoring grants, to start the grant award process over. Some folks have speculated changes could delay BEAD for another year, but I expect many states will be able to make the pivot more quickly.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently said he plans to make similar changes and probably others. I don’t understand enough about the new dynamics in DC to know if NTIA can make significant changes unilaterally or if they would want the cover provided by this legislation. The bill undoes provisions that Congress created in the original BEAD legislation, and it seems like Congress ought to be the ones to change them. But Commerce might feel they have the authority to make changes. I guess we’ll find out soon.