I’ve been saying for the last few years that the hardest job in the industry has been the folks who head State Broadband Offices. These folks took these positions because they knew they could do a lot of public good by tackling the rural broadband gap and the overall digital divide. A lot of the hard work these folks did over the last three years was erased when NTIA first eliminated the Digital Equity grants and then recently eviscerated the BEAD grants.
SBOs were handed a giant mess with the BEAD grants. I’ve always said the biggest problem with BEAD was the Congressional staffers or ISP lobbyists who wrote the BEAD legislation. They made the process cumbersome and ridiculously complicated. In my opinion, NTIA made it even worse by being overly cautious from day one. It was clear that the agency did not want to be blamed for repeating the FCC’s disasters in the RDOF and CAF II subsidy programs.
SBOs knew the BEAD grant process didn’t have to be so complicated because they have processed and awarded almost $10 billion dollars of broadband grants from the Capital Projects Fund. Those grants came with some common sense rules, but they mostly trusted the States to be good shepherds of the funding. States did an overall great job. It’s not talked about enough, but this is easily the most successful broadband grant program we’ve ever had.
But SBOs accepted the BEAD complications and slogged through the many required steps of the BEAD process. While doing this, SBOs were widely blamed for being slow and not deploying needed broadband – and most of the delays were not their fault.
Some of the steps were so ridiculous that it would be comical if so much money wasn’t riding on the grant process. For example, the NTIA guidelines for the map challenge were overly complicated and largely impossible to comply with.
This last month has been massively disappointing for SBOs. The industry has talked about solving the digital divide for at least twenty years, and SBOs finally had a chance to do something about it. The Digital Equity grants would not solely solve the digital divide, but SBOs were working to create sustainable programs that would outlive the influx of initial funding. This all went for naught when the grant program was completely killed. There are a few states where the legislature contributed some funding for digital equity, but for the most part, this effort is dead.
Now, SBOs have seen all their hard work on BEAD upended completely. States were given a fair amount of latitude to design state-specific rules for awarding BEAD grants, and it’s fair to say that every state came up with its own solution. SBOs listened to state politicians, ISPs, and the public and did their best to create a grant program that fit the specific circumstances in their state
What is probably the most disturbing about the sudden change in the rules is that BEAD was finally working. A large majority of states have started the broadband award process and have been reviewing grant applications. States like Louisiana and Nevada made it through the award process and were ready to award a lot of money to build a lot of fiber while staying within the budget that BEAD gave them. Many states that are partway through the process report that they are getting grant requests to build fiber coming in lower than their expectations.
The revised BEAD grants are nothing more than a one-round RDOF auction by State, where the ISP that asks for the least amount of funding wins. There is a slight amount of wiggle in that a grant request that is less than 15% greater than the lowest bid can be considered. But BEAD is largely now low bid takes all. The one improvement over RDOF is that ISPs must meet financial, technical, and managerial criteria before participating. But even RDOF had an important fiber preference.
I’ve read a few opinions from folks who still think that a lot of the BEAD money can now go to fiber, and I hope they are right. But I remember the shenanigans played during the RDOF auction when ISPs were vying for $9 billion in funding. What are we going to see with a much larger pile of money at stake? What’s to stop a satellite company or large WISP from bidding $2,000 or less per passing to win a whole state?
One thing is for sure. It’s a lot less enjoyable to be a State Broadband Director now, because the NTIA took away one big set of funding and took all the decision making out of the BEAD grant funding. All of the work to create unique State solutions went completely out the door.
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I’m afraid “Digital Divide” is the new “racist” term. It’s getting crammed down our throats daily and when we take a look outside at reality it doesn’t match the narrative. The usefulness of the term is fading fast.
If the reality you see doesn’t match the narrative, it likely means you’re not in community with those who’ve been promised digital equity but are still waiting for meaningful investment. The digital divide isn’t a buzzword, it has real consequences for education, jobs, healthcare access, and civic participation. Ignoring the racial and structural inequities behind it may be politically convenient, but it undermines our nation’s competitiveness and social cohesion. Real innovation isn’t lost by investing in underserved communities, it’s lost when we leave their untapped potential disconnected and unsupported
If there are people really suffering without internet connectivity they need to do exactly what we did. We took $1,000, purchased a handful of PTP radio links, with zero experience, zero network schooling, and no outside funding and built a local ISP that’s been in business for 12 years. We have around 75 towers, 4 fiber uplinks, and space in a DC with multiple 10G trunks to a couple locations on our Wisp today. Built with blood sweat and tears. It’s called hard work. And it’s rewarding.
Granted that $1,000 12 years ago is $10k today but the point still stands.
I have absolutely no shred of political motivation here.
If you want to know what is costing this country real innovation, it’s not lack of internet. It’s too much internet. Install after install, people plopped on couches, TV streaming content, phone in hand streaming other content, and zero will power to do anything other than be a raw consumer. That is what we need to fix.
As another operator half way accross the country from trendaltoews, I’ll reiterate his statements.
The so called digital divide isn’t as described. There’s connectivity nearly everywhere and at adequate speeds to work from home, do video calls, and e-learn. Very little funding needs to go out to enable these things. There are places in dire need, indian reservations for instance, places where land ownership and labor rules etc keep outside operators out, and leave little room for home-grown solutions. I run my network next to a reservation and I have no access to it, the people within it have terrible service. BEAD really can’t help here.
Much of the declared digital divide is people trying to shove every possible service down their internet connection. TV… internet connection, phone… inter, school… internet connection, turning on a wifi light bulb… quite silly but -internet connection.
I think what trendaltoews was alluding to is that like racism, it’s easy to just call everything underserved without proving it’s underserver or identifying an appropriate fix. Just sling out underserved and who cares who you hurt (or what small operator is doing a good job there and gets pushed out of business).
In that process we’re going to spend $42B dollars that is just a direct trade out for ISP investments that they would make, and not spend $42B on actually connecting the country.
I use freeways as an example a lot. Imagine BEAD as a program to make sure that every home in American has a paved driveway and putting little effort into making sure there are roads to them in the first place, or that there is economic opportunity for multiple companies to bid driveway paving out. Instead it’s 70,000-200,000 per paved driveway and a pay on their own back.
The changes to BEAD are very welcome.
Thanks Daniel. Yeah I didn’t mention this, but it doesn’t take much to work from home. We get that trick all the time.
New client calling in: “Hi, this is and I would like to get internet, I’m going to be working from home.”
My response: Sure that is no problem, work from home is the smallest usage there is so our cheapest plan will easily satisfy that
New client: ….uh, well I’m gonna stream also, and game, so I need it to work good.
That’s called bluffing, it’s dishonest and causes distrust all around.
This analysis might be a bit too pessimistic. The “priority broadband project” definition from the statute is still in the guidance, and give states a warrant to prefer projects that can meet a high performance standard.
I hope you are right. It will require Broadband Offices to ruthlessly disallow ISPs – not easy to do.
I challenge anyone here to seriously try working from home with 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up—especially in a household with kids doing online school, streaming video, or just using the internet like any normal family. The claim that “it doesn’t take much to work from home” completely ignores reality. What kind of work are you talking about? Certainly not engineering, data-heavy tasks, cloud-based tools, video conferencing, or remote collaboration.
Let’s be honest—fixed wireless might look fine on paper, but it crumbles under real-world demand, especially with upload speeds like that. It’s not reliable, it’s not scalable, and it doesn’t serve modern households. Fiber, on the other hand, is future-proof. It supports symmetrical speeds, handles multiple users and applications at once, and gives people a real shot at fully participating in the economy, education, and telehealth. No household today is using the internet solely for one quiet email job. That’s not how people live, and it’s definitely not how they work.
Our family did a “taste test” on FWA in our home in the suburbs of WDC (two adults, two H.S.- and college-age teens), and it failed big time.
We have FiOS in our home and the FWA offered by our cellular carrier was laughably bad. FWA worked less than about 40% of the time. The data was bursty, and the transmission was error-prone. Barely good enough for laptop data, it truly failed on TV signal.
VZ’s FiOS customer service is (by my own estimation) absymal — I’ve referred them a few times to the MPSC and Office of People’s Counsel — but the FiOS signal is head-and-antlers better than the competition.
there are 2 radically different ‘FWA’ models.
Cellular ‘FWA’ (which is false, it’s not ‘fixed’, it’s a bulky ‘mobile’ device) is troublesome. It’s going to suffer congestion issues that follow traffic patterns, it’s got very limited overall capacity, there’s no concept of a commit rate, etc. Frankly, it’s a massive disservice to mobile customers having ‘FWA’ services eat up those finite resources.
traditional FWA, you know the kind that’s installed in a fixed position etc, is essentially a completely different type of product. Yes, there’s a HUGE variance between providers and some have ’25×3′ which is just a label to get them through the last fcc broadband number and they are underengineered etc. However, there are many that have reliable delivery at full gigabit or more, and don’t oversell/overcommit the access technology to the extreme etc. The fixed installation allows for dramatically high signal levels and higher reliability and speeds. IMO, this difference is likely the level of competition around. no 25×3 ISP survives in a market with a 50×5 or 100×10 etc.
We operate with multiple technologies. some fiber, some copper, and basically every wireless tech you can touch except 5Gnr which we might get into soon enough. We offer fully semetrical 1Gx1G on mmwave, some async on other high end radios like 500×250, 1Gx500, etc. We peal customers off Spectrum DOCSIS and keep them and we’ve taken hundreds of customers off fttx networks.
Technology matters, and fiber has a lot of pluses, but the company and the network behind those services matters much more than the technology. A really good, properly engineered 25×5 connection that reliably delivers that with great latency for a typical work-at-home person that isn’t also running an entire household at the same time is very usable. however, if you have a solid wISP that would have delivered you that 25×5, then you probably have a 100×20 or greater option available from them. ie, that company is likely staying up-to-date and works hard on their customer experience and reputation. Loops back to the ‘company and network matter more’ concept.
Taxpayers should be funding economic viability for their communities, but they should not be funding entertainment. If work from home requires a 50×50 or whatever, we should talk about making sure the market can deliver that, but supporting that while also supporting netflix and xbox gameplay should be outside of the scope of taxpayer funding.
I’m typing this on a symetrical 1G plan with a product called ubiquiti wave pro that is fed off a 10G DIA fiber. I get a full 1Gx1G speed test result because I’ve provisioned this service at 1.1Gx1.1G on a 2.5G port so my speed tests aren’t ‘936Mbps’ etc, and my latency to google and microsoft is 14ms.
It doesn’t make any sense to drop all ‘FWA’ services into a single bucket, because fundamentally they are different from each other, using different equipment, different standards, and with various business standards.
It’s hard to take someone serious when they feel the need to create a username like you did.
But let’s play along, show me the numbers from the ISP you manage. We have hundreds of people working from home. What do you call “data-heavy” tasks? Usually when people tell me what they think is data heavy it’s trivial. What cloud based tools? Have you ever watched someone’s bandwidth while they were using any or multiple of the various tools online? I have. It is not near as heavy as you think it is.
As far as if fixed wireless is satisfying the need, yeah, it is. We have users moving multiple terabytes of data every month on all of our service plans. They have been doing it for years already. No complaints. The argument I always push back with on this is how long do we have to do this successfully for it to be called a success? We’ve been doing fixed wireless for over 12 years. Currently we have nearly 900 clients. This year is our worst year so far in losses to competition. We have lost exactly 3 clients. Three. Our non-wireless competition offers speeds up to 1Gbps for cheaper than we offer 25 Mbps. We’re taking clients from them routinely. Year over year. Please explain this away… yes we offer faster services, 100, 200, and 300 Mbps. And we’re currently doing 1Gbps DIA services to commercial clients.
Meanwhile, a client in our state is spending thousands of dollars rebuilding “future proof” fiber LAN networks. Why? Because that future proof fiber turned out to be too slow for 2020. You can laugh, but as a band-aid for the last 5 years we have been using fixed wireless equipment at 2-10x the capacity of that fiber network to distribute their local network until they could pull all new fiber in. I’m sure “this time” though it’ll be “forever fiber”… Meanwhile will continue delivering rock solid 0.0% packet loss low latency connections to happy people in our coverage area. I can forklift our whole network to new tech for around the cost of a couple miles of fiber construction in our state. And I haven’t taken one cent of tax payer money to do this. As Daniel Denson mentions, why should tax payers fund a Netflix habit. If work from home is a “right” then lets fund an adequate amount of bandwidth for that and if you want to gorge on 4k Netflix, go ahead, pay for it. We’ll be waiting there to take the money and deliver the content, on fixed wireless.
yeah, I want to reinforce this.
Something I say a LOT is ‘we are selling speed tests’ because that’s mostly what the big numbers are for.
yes, there are customers that have higher needs. gamers will benefit when they have a 186GB update. there is a place for higher speeds.
However, the context of this blog post is BEAD and how much and where the government should spend money to get people adequate service. Not ‘platinum’ service, adequate service.
Like trendaltoews, we have been in business over a decade and we have some customers still happily running on our original equipment getting 30×10. We sell anything though, 30Mbps to 2Gbps. And the difference in typical use between the two is… well about double or so and that’s mostly because Netflix didn’t stream 4k until it saw about 31Mbps on a speed test.
We have a hard time getting people to upgrade. 30×10 is more that adequate for at least 80% of people, it’s enough that they are happy with it. again, like my previous post, you have to have a GOOD 30×10 that you actually get during work hours and prime time which isn’t always the case.
When fiber overbuilds happen, we don’t lose customers. Maybe a couple peel off but we get a few and are still growing even in fiber areas.
The network matters, the customer service matters, the company matters. The speeds matter also but not as much as most people are being told.