Tag Archives: Arielle Roth

Technology-neutral Policy

Arielle Roth, the Administrator of NTIA, made a speech to the American Enterprise Institute that was titled There Is No Such Thing as “Future-Proof” Technology. Her speech was in reference to the upcoming 6G technology.

She made a really interesting observation about 6G that I hadn’t seen before: That lesson is especially timely as we stand at the frontier of AI-native 6G . . . Perhaps the defining feature of AI-native 6G is not simply that it will make communications networks more intelligent. It is that it will make the future of communications even less predictable. Previous generations of wireless networks were designed primarily to move information faster. The next generation promises networks that increasingly optimize, adapt, and derive insight from the information they carry. As intelligence becomes embedded within the network itself, we should become more humble about our ability to know which technologies, architectures, or applications will ultimately prevail.

Obviously, NTIA is on the 6G bandwagon, much like the first Trump administration was on the 5G bandwagon. To some degree, it’s the government’s role to promote new technologies, and this is done for many other technologies outside of telecom.

I have my doubts that carriers are going to build networks that are less predictable, because that sounds rife with risk. I have serious doubts that the big carriers are going to hand off the responsibility to operate 6G networks completely to AI. The industry learned a lesson last year with the big Verizon outage that lasted far longer than it should have when technicians couldn’t figure out how to fix problems in AI-generated software. Everything I’ve been reading is that the big nationwide networks are bringing more human intervention back into the operation and troubleshooting of networks.

The speech then went on to talk about technology-neutrality. Roth said that the government should never favor any technology, since doing so changes the direction of industry by crowding out innovation.

To some degree, it’s hard to argue with that statement since there are many examples in the past where governments stuck with older technologies and ignored innovations. But it’s hard to say that the current Administration is technology-neutral when it favors traditional power technologies over wind and solar.

Roth said that technology-neutrality matters the most in rural areas, where low-Earth orbit satellite constellations have reduced the cost of reaching people. She said satellite has made obsolete the idea that we need to build wireline networks to reach homes.

I don’t think she is going to find very many local governments and people in rural areas who share her vision that satellite technology is superior to fiber networks. I’ve worked with several hundred counties who understand that a fiber network build today puts their county in a good competitive position for the rest of this century. I don’t know one rural county who regrets the construction of fiber networks.

I find it interesting that she brought up rural broadband in the context of touting 6G, because 6G is not coming to most of rural America, just like 5G didn’t. If anything, the transition from using lower frequencies for 4G to higher ones for 5G and 6G means that rural cellular coverage will continue to shrink over time.

Just as an aside, as she has done in the past, Roth referred to the reduction of BEAD infrastructure grants as a savings to the taxpayer – again hinting that NTIA is going to be reluctant to release much, if any, of the BEAD nondeployment funds.

Nondeployment Funds Still in Limbo

Arielle Roth, the NTIA Administrator, recently testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Before the hearing, Roth provided a written statement covering a range of the activities currently being pursued at NTIA. This includes:

  • The effort the NTIA is undertaking to help the FCC find 800 MHz of spectrum for public auction. This directive was mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill. For those who might not be aware of the details of spectrum management, the FCC regulates spectrum used by the public, and NTIA oversees spectrum used by the government.
  • How NTIA is working with the standards bodies that are developing the specifications for 6G. This includes a forum hosted in March that focused on the supply chain issues for U.S. companies building advanced robotics, which I assume must somehow involve 6G.
  • Bragging about progress with universal broadband availability, stressing the role that satellite broadband plays in making broadband available everywhere. She is still touting how the BEAD Benefit of the Bargain rules lower costs to taxpayers. She said the average cost per BEAD location is $4,765. Illinois and California BEAD applications are still pending at NTIA, with the agency having the Illinois proposal for eight months.
  • How NTIA is enhancing public safety through approval of FirstNet and how NTIA got AT&T to agree to take $2 billion less in funding.
  • Finally, Roth talked about an initiative to reduce screen times for school students. It’s a topic I’m still trying to get my head around since I can’t see how NTIA, which is essentially the government’s IT department, has any role in this kind of issue.

There was one big item that was conspicuously missing from her written comments. NTIA is still deciding what to do with the $21 billion of BEAD nondeployment funds that are left after making grants for BEAD broadband infrastructure. This is by far the biggest dollar item sitting at the NTIA, and it’s curious that there was no mention of it in the written comments, since many members of Congress are highly interested in how and when this money will be used.

During her testimony, Roth said that BEAD nondeployment funds are still up in the air. To provide a little history on BEAD nondeployment funds:

  • The original BEAD legislation, passed back in 2020, said that permissible uses of nondeployment funds included digital skills training, telehealth and remote learning access, cybersecurity education, digital navigator programs, or direct subsidies to low-income homes.
  • Originally, twelve states were sure they would have money left over after infrastructure deployment, twelve were sure they would not, and the rest kept the door open to possibly having some nondeployment funding.
  • NTIA completely rewrote the BEAD grant rules in its June 2025 BEAD Restructuring Notice. Those rules greatly reduced the amount of money that would be spent on infrastructure (greatly increasing the nondeployment funds). That Notice made it clear that NTIA intended to redefine the ways that nondeployment funds could be used. After that Notice, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick began referring to BEAD nondeployment funds as a “saving” for the taxpayer, implying that the funds would be eliminated or greatly curtailed.
  • During the rest of 2025, as the country awaited the new rules related to nondeployment, a number of Senators, Representatives, and Governors from both parties pleaded with NTIA to release the funds.
  • In December 2025, Executive Order 14365 directed Commerce to withhold nondeployment funds from any states with “onerous” AI regulations and also gave NTIA until March to announce its plans for releasing the nondeployment funds.
  • In February 2026, Commerce Secretary Lutnick announced that Commerce had no plans to withhold nondeployment funds, and NTIA held two “listening sessions” to hear ideas on how to use the nondeployment funds.
  • In March, NTIA slipped the date for making a decision on nondeployment until June 2026. Throughout 2026, both Secretary Lutnick and Administrator Roth have occasionally referred to nondeployment as a savings for taxpayers.
  • During testimony in the House hearing, Roth said that she now expects the plans for BEAD nondeployment to be announced sometime this summer (which could be any time before September 21). Roth said that NTIA wants to get the guidance right and not rush through the process.

It’s anybody’s guess if nondeployment funds will ever be released. It’s now been 13 months since the NTIA changed the rules for nondeployment funds, and they are obviously in no hurry to see these funds ever get spent.

Justifying Cuts to BEAD

NTIA Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth recently made a speech at the Hudson Institute that outlined her policy positions related to reshaping the BEAD program. The changes to BEAD were initiated by Commerce Secretary Lutnick and are now being finalized and implemented by Roth. The bottom-line impact of the changes will be to cut the amount of spending from the BEAD grant program roughly in half, with the savings returned to the Treasury.

Roth says that the changes are not just about saving money. Her position is that the cuts being made are to make sure that the government doesn’t distort or sabotage the pace of technological innovation.  To quote Roth, When the government overspends or over-subsidizes a single technology, it doesn’t just waste funds; it warps the progress of innovation. Excessive subsidies crowd out private investment, slow down research and development, and delay technological progress. That’s counterproductive to BEAD’s mission, which is to close broadband gaps, not freeze technology in place. In a field as dynamic as broadband, minimizing distortion is critical, because in every case, the most significant breakthroughs in connecting rural Americans have come not from subsidies, but from technological innovation itself.

That’s an amazing policy position to take related to rural broadband. I’d like to put her position into a bigger perspective. Her argument is a good one related to the whole broadband industry. I don’t know anybody who would argue that the federal government should help to pick technology winners for the entire industry. The market today is taking care of that pretty well. Over the past several years, over 14.5 million customers have chosen to buy broadband from the FWA cellular companies, much to the dismay of the cable companies. A recent article said that major fiber overbuilders in urban and suburban markets are seeing penetration rates between 35% and 45%. Starlink has grown to have four million U.S. broadband customers. It seems like the overall market is working pretty well, being fueled by private capital and head-to-head competition.

But even there, the federal government can’t help itself from fiddling at least a little bit with the market. Congress recently directed the FCC to rework mid-band spectrum allocations to bring 600 megahertz of spectrum to auction. That action will benefit FWA cellular competition even more than cellular service. That’s what incessant lobbying and contributions from the cellular industry buy. But mostly, the government hasn’t been intervening in the broader broadband market.

Roth’s policy position falls flat when applied to the tiny world of BEAD. The BEAD grant program aims to bring broadband to the last 6 to 7 million locations that got left behind by the market. For the most part, the BEAD locations are the most remote or least dense areas where nobody has been willing to make private investments. Congress recognized this when they developed BEAD, and it’s still the market reality. Without a one-time grant subsidy, these locations will likely never see better broadband.

How BEAD grants are awarded is extremely important to the households that will get the broadband, along with the construction companies and vendors that will supply the materials and labor to implement the grants. A lot of rural people put effort into the BEAD process in the hopes of getting a generational broadband upgrade.

But the technology chosen for BEAD has almost zero impact on the bigger U.S. broadband market. It really doesn’t matter to the larger market if the BEAD money all goes for fiber or all goes for satellite. It’s absolutely impossible to make an argument with a straight face that the technologies chosen for BEAD will somehow “warp the progress of innovation” if it’s not done just right.

I know Assistant Secretary Roth is looking for a good argument for awarding all of the locations in a rural county to satellite instead of fiber – but this argument is not it. The truth is that the NTIA changes to BEAD are only about saving money. NTIA could have completed the BEAD grant award on the same timeline by deciding to spend the full $42.5 billion, but they chose not to. They whacked the spending in half and are now searching for a clever way to justify their choices. I can’t think of a more ludicrous argument than one that says that spending more BEAD money on fiber would somehow sabotage the overall pace of broadband technology innovation for the country.

Starlink Disputes Virginia BEAD Awards

In an action that surprises nobody, Starlink has taken exception to the BEAD awards being proposed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) of Virginia, which is administering the BEAD grants in the State.

The Starlink comments were filed in response to the proposed final report from DHCD that informs NTIA of its proposed BEAD awards. Each state must solicit public comments on the proposed awards. These comments are forwarded to NTIA, and the agency has the final say on making the awards.

Starlink objected to the BEAD awards and said that it should have been awarded $60 million. To put Starlink’s complaint into perspective, Virginia is proposing to award BEAD funds to cover 133,500 locations. The proposed award to Starlink was $3.26 million to cover 5,579 locations for an average award of $584 per location. Project Kuiper was also awarded funding for satellite broadband, with a proposed award of $4.46 million to cover 6,967 locations for an average award of $641 per location. The two companies together have proposed awards to cover 9.4% of the BEAD locations in the State.

Virginia proposes to award 1,519 locations for fixed wireless technology, or 1.1% of BEAD locations. Most of the proposed funding went to fiber. It’s not easy to cite the exact percentage going to fiber since Comcast won awards for 24,343 locations, some to be served with fiber and some to be served by traditional cable TV technology. Over 89% of the awards went to either fiber or cable TV technology.

The Virginia public comment period on the proposed BEAD grants is for seven days, and other states will have similar comment periods. All of the states are hurrying to get a final report generated by the September 4 deadline set by NTIA, and most states are expected to meet the deadline. That means there will be a lot of opportunities over the next month for Starlink to make similar comments in other state’s proposed final reports.

To put Starlink’s request for $60 million into perspective, the company says that amount would cover almost all of the eligible locations in the State. We’ll have to wait to see how NTIA reacts to the Starlink comments. The agency has the flexibility to agree with or ignore Starlink. This final decision rests with Arielle Roth, the newly seated head of NTIA.

This issue has to be a hot potato in a purple state like Virginia. The state has a Republican Governor who recently praised the proposed BEAD awards. I’m sure that County and State elected officials have been publicly praising the proposed awards that will bring fiber to a lot or rural Virginia. Nobody knows what happens if NTIA agrees with Starlink. NTIA could decide which fiber grants to undo, but it would more likely pass the issue back to the State.

To complicate matters even further, Starlink’s filed comments in the BEAD process is not necessarily the end of the line, and Starlink or fiber providers who lose proposed grants in this process could file a lawsuit if they disagree with the final decision of NTIA or DHCD. BEAD could still get very messy before it’s done.