The last two days I wrote about the impact of the changes to the BEAD program on County Governments and on State Broadband Offices. As important as those impacts are, the real impact from changing BEAD is on the public living in the rural areas that are covered by BEAD.
Let me start with BEAD eligibility. The new rules include a provision that wireless ISPs (WISPS) that claim speeds to the FCC of 100/20 Mbps using unlicensed spectrum can certify their capability to State Broadband Offices and have those areas removed from BEAD eligibility. That means people living in the removed areas will not be seeing a new broadband alternative. It doesn’t matter if the WISP actually has speed far slower than 100/20 Mbps. It doesn’t matter homes have a line-of-sight issue and can’t be served by the WISP. It doesn’t matter if the WISP wants to charge $100 a month for 25 Mbps service. NTIA will have declared that these areas are served and deserve no federal funding for broadband upgrades. My guess is that millions of homes will be removed from the BEAD map and will be declared as already being served – which will be a huge surprise to the people living in these areas.
The biggest change in the new BEAD rules is that there will be a lot less fiber built with BEAD funds. Various States have been expecting anywhere from 60% to 95% of BEAD funding to go to build fiber. The revised rules will eliminate most of that fiber. BEAD grants will now be awarded to the ISP that asks for the lowest amount of funding for each location. Satellite and fixed wireless providers can easily underbid fiber ISPs if they want to serve a given market. This is going to save the federal government a lot of money, and a large portion of the $42.5 billion allocated to BEAD will not be spent.
Households in BEAD areas are likely to see BEAD money going to a WISP or Starlink – and on paper, that will be their fast ISP option. To be fair, WISPs who install the latest radios might deliver speeds up to 500 Mbps to many customers. But because of the line-of-sight issues with fixed wireless, some homes won’t be able to get service at all. But BEAD winners will not have to spend the extra money for the newest radios – technology capable of 100/20 Mbps is considered to be okay.
Unless they change their pricing philosophy, some WISPs have very high prices. Where fiber providers who won BEAD were likely going to charge $70 per month, some of the WISPs are already charging more than $100 for slower speeds. Starlink is already expensive – the company now has an $80 product in some markets, but its normal price is $120 per month.
Rural residents already feel like they’ve been jerked around for years. The FCC held a reverse auction for RDOF in 2010, and many of the networks promised by that funding are still not built – and might not be for 3 more years. Somebody promised a new solution from a BEAD grant might not see a solution until 2029. Many rural residents who have been told they have faster broadband coming are so cynical that they’ve stopped believing anything they hear about broadband. Certainly, many who have been told for the last few years that BEAD was going to bring them fiber are now going to be disappointed again.
I could write a dozen blogs about what good broadband meets for rural households – and I’ve written about this often over the years. Good broadband means kids can do homework and not have to sit in the parking lot of a library in the evening to do school work. Good broadband means rural residents can find online work that pays better than jobs available in their rural county. Good rural broadband means farmers can participate in the latest technology. Good broadband means houses for sale that somebody is willing to buy.
I’m picturing a resident who is told later this year that the federal government and their State Broadband Office is making a grant to Starlink to bring them faster broadband. They’ve already been able to buy Starlink for several years. They might already have rejected it for being too expensive. They might have already tried it and rejected it because of interference with trees or hills. If they’ve already heard through local politicians that better broadband is coming, can they conclude anything other than the government at all levels has screwed them on broadband while handing money to a company that doesn’t need it?
The consensus has been that BEAD was going to bring fiber to thousands of counties. Unless public pressure reverses some or all of the NTIA Notice, there will be many millions of rural homes after BEAD that still won’t have adequate broadband. I guess this means that States and local governments will have to regroup and get back to tackling the rural broadband gap a little bit at a time.
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Its a failure of biden administration not to get this moving quickly. Too many rules and red tape. This should be in the build phase now. If it had been being built out, the rules would not be changed so radically. There is no urgency out of either party to really help rural residents. Same thing on ev charging. A bunch of infrastructure act(oh sorry, inflation reduction act) money and next to nothing actually installed. Big government at its worse. So instead these promises will not be fulfilled. Biden administration seemed more concerned with who did the work in what way than in actually getting it done.
I wouldn’t give the Biden administration a pass on this since I agree that the terms and conditions of the BEAD grant delayed the program. BUT….if the government had taxed ink in the 19th century so only a few wealthy urban newspapers could publish, or they priced radio towers so that only a few wealthy urban radio stations could operate or they didn’t build roads to deliver newspapers to rural communities we would have been outraged at government action to limit our access to our first amendment right to free speech.
How is this any different?
how different? how is it even remotely the same. The only way your list of analogies works is if you said ‘government paid for a chosen newspapers ink’ and ‘government built radio towers for their chosen station’. This is tax money. I should not be paying for your speech. I didn’t pay for your post here and you didn’t pay for mine and somehow we both got it on this site without BEAD.
There is no free speech component here at all. It’s not the government’s place to hold the microphone to your lips for your free speech.
People need to stop diluting constitutional claims. the more you cry wolf about free speech when it’s not, the less anyone hears the real violations of it.