This is my first-ever list of annual broadband turkey awards, which I’m awarding for the worst industry events of 2025. I’ve never done this before, because there have never been enough negative events in a single year to make a list like this. I hope I won’t be able to make a list again at the end of 2026.

5 – Major Cloud Outages

There has been an increasing occurrence of major cloud outages this past year, including outages from Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). It seems like the outages are growing in severity and breadth due to the growing concentration of the operation of the web into a handful of companies. At the same time, each of these providers also seems to be pursuing the consolidation of their networks into a small number of core data hubs. This combination now means that something as simple as a DNS error can get magnified into a major outage affecting multiple industries and causing billions in damages in a short time. This goes on the turkey award list since every one of us is at the mercy of a prolonged broadband outage caused at some distant data center.

4 – Congress Determining Spectrum Policy

In the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress seemingly usurped spectrum policy by mandating that 800 megahertz of mid-range spectrum be set aside for new FCC auctions. This undoes the historical deliberative process that balanced the needs of the many users of spectrum. This was seemingly done as a way to justify cutting taxes elsewhere, but the real reason behind this new mandate was the cell industry lobbyists doing an end run around everybody else in a land grab for some of the most valuable spectrum. This goes on the turkey award list since the FCC will likely have to raid the spectrum needed for other vital purposes like rural broadband and WiFi.

3 – BEAD Awards to Amazon LEO

In a process that is so absurd that it’s hard to discuss without laughing, we’ve allocated federal grant funding to serve at least 700,000 rural homes to an ISP that currently has no broadband infrastructure, and that has never served a single broadband customer. This might eventually turn out not to be a disaster, but this has to be one of the oddest things that has ever happened in the industry. This goes on the turkey awards list, well . . . because.

2 Killing the Digital Equity Act Funding

The Administration and the NTIA killed funding for grants from the Digital Equity Act, seemingly because the title of the law included the word “equity”. The grants were to tackle digital inclusion and specifically were aimed at making sure that people have access to computers and other devices and that they learn how to use them to increase digital literacy in the country. This decision is hard to understand at a time when the same federal government is forcing the public to interface electronically with government agencies. This same government is also saying that the future of the country is AI. This goes on the turkey award list because we seemed to have made a major policy decision based on misunderstanding the meaning of a word in the title of the law.

 1 Benefit of the Bargain

This was the process of the BEAD grant process that cut funding for broadband grants in half. It’s the most poorly-named process ever in the broadband industry since it isn’t a benefit to the many people who will no longer get a fast broadband solution, and it’s not a bargain for anybody that I can identify. The award goes equally to whoever came up with the plan to cut the BEAD infrastructure grants in half, and to the person who came up with this dreadful name.