Tag Archives: BEAD

What Happened to Accelerated BEAD?

The BEAD road has been a long one. BEAD was first created by Congress in November 2021, meaning we’re now more than four years into the program. There are now a handful of BEAD projects under construction in a few states, but in most places, the BEAD grant program is still mired in the paperwork process that precedes releasing funds to ISPs.

To contrast BEAD with other large broadband programs, two large federal grant programs were approved by Congress in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA). I estimate that the Coronavirus State and Local Recovery Fund (SLFRF) funded at least $9 billion in fiber projects. The Capital Project Funds (CPF) funded at least $11.5 billion in fiber projects. These programs were initiated only nine months before BEAD, yet the construction for awards for both programs must be completed by the end of this year.

That is blazingly faster than the BEAD timeline. BEAD proponents will rattle off a list of reasons why BEAD has taken so long, and I’ve even talked to some people who think the long BEAD timeline was intentional. A few States like Louisiana now have BEAD construction underway. But on the whole, there are still a lot of states that haven’t yet pulled the trigger.

In case you haven’t seen it, NTIA has a website that tracks the last major hurdles for each state to final federal approval. This website shows

  • Three states – California, Illinois, and Oklahoma – are still waiting for approval from NTIA for their Final Proposal that describes the BEAD grants they want to award.
  • 15 states and territories have NTIA final approval but are still waiting for NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to approve the paperwork. NIST’s role is to make sure the grant paperwork is complete and meets the requirements of the original BEAD legislation.
  • 15 more states and territories have made it through NTIA and NIST approval, but still have not signed a contract with NTIA on the use of the BEAD funding. There is no way to know how much of this delay might be the typical delay from state and NTIA lawyers haggling over contracts versus states that are having disputes over contract requirements.
  • 23 states and territories have made it through all of these steps and are free to begin negotiating contracts with grant winners. I’ve heard from ISPs in some states that getting through the contract issue requires a lot of final paperwork and effort, but this seems to differ by state.

You might recall that before the election in 2024, Louisiana had made it through the BEAD process and was ready to start making grant awards. There were three or four other states that were very close behind.

When the new administration came in, one of the first things we heard from Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, was that the BEAD process would be accelerated to put the grant funds to use. He was highly critical of the prior administration that hadn’t yet connected any households to broadband by the end of 2024. Everybody in the industry was hoping that NTIA was going to speed up the process.

However, the BEAD process went into a deep freeze while the NTIA decided what it wanted to do with the program. It took until June 6 last year before NTIA announced new Benefit of the Bargain rules. By then, almost all of the states had conducted BEAD grant application rounds and had identified potential winners. The Benefit of the Bargain required states to start over. It set a cap on the BEAD grant awards in every state, and many original potential winners dropped out of the grant process. We’re now back close to the same place the program would have been a year ago, with a number of states having BEAD winners. It’s pretty easy to argue that NTIA added nearly an additional year to the BEAD process. NTIA will say it was worth it since a lot less funding is being awarded. I’d bet the folks who will wait an extra year to see construction, or those who are now getting satellite instead of fiber, aren’t big fans of the extra delays.

State Broadband Regulation

The industry spends a lot of time focusing on potential federal broadband regulation, and bills introduced in Congress get a lot of press. It’s easy to forget that a lot of broadband legislation happens at the State level,

NCSL (the National Conference of State Legislators) tracks state legislation across the country and wrote an article summarizing state legislation related to broadband issues. 2025 was a busy year for broadband legislation, and there were over 600 broadband bills introduced in state legislatures, with 139 bills enacted into law. The article is a great resource for anybody who wants to dig deeper since it links to the enacted bills that are mentioned in the story.

Poles and Permitting

Seventy of the enacted laws established new state rules related to pole attachments and permitting. We’re likely to see a flurry of more laws in this area in 2026 since BEAD grant rules require states to approve or deny applications for permits on State highways and land be approved or denied within 90 days. The bills highlighted in the article include:

  • Idaho HB 180 requires public utilities to allow space on poles for broadband, cable and telecommunications equipment and allows the Idaho Public Utilities Commission to mediate if parties cannot agree on rates, conditions, and timing. The legislature thought this law was needed since municipal pole owners are excluded from federal pole attachment rules.
  • Indiana SB 502 adopts the timelines required by BEAD and also establishes a timeline for quick mediation of disputes.
  • Maine HB 559 gives more authority to towns over approving the building of new poles. The law allows smaller towns than previously to deny applications to build new poles as long as the reason for the rejection is related to public safety or welfare.
  • Colorado HB 1056 and West Virginia HB 3144 allows for automatic approval of specific kinds of applications for rights-of-way and permits for wireless infrastructure.

Critical Infrastructure Protections

There has been a major uptick in damage and vandalism to communications infrastructure in recent years that has resulted in serious network outages. State legislatures reacted to passing legislation that establishes or creates penalties for those who damage networks. I discussed this topic in several blogs this year, one that asks when network damage might be considered to be terrorism, and one that looks at the trend of declaring broadband networks to be critical infrastructure.

The article provides links to the text of approved legislation that have increased penalties for those who damage communication infrastructure, enacted by Alabama SB 54, Iowa HB 879, Kansas HB 2061, Kentucky SB 64, Louisiana SB 22, Montana HB 257, and West Virginia HB 3504. A few states went even further, and Oklahoma HB 2104 and Texas SB 1646 categorized damage to communications infrastructure as felonies.

Looking Ahead to 2026

It’s likely that there will also be a lot of new legislation in 2026. As mentioned above, States likely will tighten approval times for rights-of-way and permitting on state lands and highways to comply with BEAD. An area that is seeing a lot of discussion is data centers, and it seems likely that states will pass legislation that establishes rules related to the placement, energy use, and environmental issues related to new data centers. While not directly related to broadband, it seems likely that there will be a lot of new State regulations related to AI.

Is There a Fiber Crunch?

There have been a number of articles in the industry press predicting a major shortage of fiber in 2026. Fiber manufacturers have already been working at full capacity due to the large amounts of fiber networks being built. Telcos like AT&T, Frontier, Brightspeed, Windstream, Consolidated, and many others have been busy building fiber. The big cable companies like Comcast, Charter, and Cox have been building fiber. There are numerous fiber overbuilders like Lumos and Metronet, which were purchased by T-Mobile and numerous other companies funded by venture capital. By my math, there was also over $13 billion spent in 2025 to build fiber, funded by grants and subsidies like ARPA, Capital Project Funds, RDOF, ReConnect, EA-CAM, etc.

2026 should also be a busy year for fiber construction. The telcos, cable companies, and fiber overbuilders are all planning a lot of fiber construction. There is still a little over $10 billion in planned fiber construction funded by the same existing subsidy and grant programs, plus there will start to be orders for fiber from BEAD grants as the year goes by.

Fierce Network talked to the major fiber manufacturers like CommScope, Clearfield, Corning, and STL, and was told that the companies are seeing unprecedented demand to provide fiber for AI data centers. This demand comes from both inside new data centers and also for the networks that tie data centers together.

I think people will be surprised to hear the amount of fiber wiring needed inside an AI data center. The Fierce Network article quoted Rahul Puri, the CEO of the Optical Networking Business STL, as saying that an AI data center needs 36 times as much fiber wiring as a normal data center. Anybody who’s ever been in a traditional data center will be floored by that assertion since there are typically large amounts of fiber wiring either under the floors or overhead of racks in a traditional data center. A Fierce Network article in December said that the giant 1 million processor data center being built in Louisiana by Meta will require 8 million miles of individual strands of fiber. Most of these strands will be part of fiber bundles of hundreds to a thousand fibers. The data needed to connect processors is gigantic.

Corning and other vendors are working on new technologies that will provide the needed connectivity within a data center, such as co-packaged optics that place optics and electronics closer together. Other vendors like STL are investigating hollow-core fiber to increase density and decrease latency.

There is also a huge demand for middle-mile fiber to connect AI data centers. Research firm RVA LLC predicts that 92,000 new route miles of fiber will be needed to connect data centers over the next five years. These are also big fiber bundles. My firm worked on a data center proposal last year that didn’t come to fruition, where the data center builder wanted a 512-fiber backhaul network.

One of the biggest challenges for the vendors is that there are different kinds of fiber for different uses, like inside a data center, in middle-mile networks, in last-mile networks, for drops, and inside buildings. The challenge for vendors will be to match manufacturing output with demand.

Vendors and industry experts are predicting that some kinds of fiber could experience ordering backlogs as long as a year. Vendors are likely going to satisfy their largest customers first, so smaller projects might find themselves in a bind.

It will be ironic after all of the hurry up and wait for BEAD if grant projects are badly delayed due to a fiber supply chain problem. But all of the industry predictions are based upon demand staying firm. There  are a number of credible predictions that there will be an AI market contraction in the coming year since data center supply seems to have outstripped the ability to generate the revenues needed to make the industry viable.

The Fiber Broadband Association says it is not expecting big backlogs in the fiber needed to build last-mile networks. I guess none of us will know for sure until we start seeing smaller ISPs place orders for fiber later this year.

BEAD and Affordability

One of the big glaring weaknesses of BEAD was that the enabling legislation and the NTIA rules made it impossible to consider affordability as a criterion of selecting BEAD grant winners. A few states tried to stress affordability during the BEAD process, but were largely shut down by the NTIA. After the Benefit of the Bargain rules, consideration of affordability went out the door, along with all factors other than the construction cost per passing.

In a speech made to the Hudson Institute, NTIA Assistant Secretary Aerielle Roth was quoted as saying, “This administration does not want BEAD to become just another well-intentioned broadband program that falls short. Its mission is nothing less than to close the “digital divide” once and for all.”

Unfortunately, the BEAD infrastructure grants alone were never going to close the digital divide. When we talk about solving the rural digital divide, we’re really talking about several different issues. A primary element of solving the digital divide is broadband availability, which is what infrastructure grants tackle. BEAD focused on making sure that BEAD-eligible locations got at least one broadband option with a speed of at least 100/20 Mbps.

Solving the digital divide means two more things. First, it means making sure that people have computers and devices and know how to use them effectively. Finally, solving the digital divide means having broadband that people can afford.

Congress intended to tackle all these elements of the digital divide solution. The Digital Equity Act was intended to provide the funding needed to make sure that folks had devices and knew how to use them. That effort was going to be bolstered by BEAD non-deployment funds that didn’t get used for infrastructure. Unfortunately, NTIA and the Administration have refused to distribute the funding from the Digital Equity Act, and it appears likely that most or all of the non-deployment funds won’t be made available to States.

At the time that the BEAD legislation was approved, the ACP program was underway to provide low-income homes with a monthly $30 discount off broadband. The BEAD legislation mandated that BEAD winners enroll and use the ACP program. Unfortunately, Congress let that program lapse.

There were State Broadband Offices that tried to tackle the affordability issue through the scoring of grants. These States tried to assign a lot of grant points to ISPs that offered lower rates. For example, the proposed grant scoring in some states would have given an edge to a cooperative with $65 rates over satellite broadband priced at $120 or another ISP with $100 rates.

The BEAD legislation said that States couldn’t use BEAD rules to ‘set rates’, and there were a few States that tried to do that in their grant scoring and tried to force rates as low as $30 or $40. NTIA nixed State attempts to force lower rates even before this year’s Benefit of the Bargain rules.

It’s a shame that overall rates couldn’t be considered in BEAD, because household incomes are lower in rural areas than in non-urban areas, meaning that affordability is more of an issue in rural areas. This is not true for all BEAD areas, but many of the areas covered by BEAD are both rural and poor. According to statistics published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency at the end of 2024, 18% of rural homes have household incomes under $25,000 per year, compared to 15% in non-rural areas. There is also a significantly higher percentage of rural homes with household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000 (21% vs. 17%).

To me, the bottom line is that BEAD is not going to solve the rural digital divide since it focuses only on infrastructure. NTIA has to shoulder the blame for nixing the grant funding that would have provided devices and digital skills training. Congress has to take the blame for ignoring profitability when it required  ACP participation as a component of BEAD, and then let ACP lapse without a replacement.

Misaligned Priorities

We have several sets of broadband priorities at odds with each other in the country. The federal government is on a big push to move all transactions with the government to digital. The example that got a lot of press was when FEMA said it would only communicate with disaster victims through emails and its online portal. But government agencies across the board are pushing folks online to communicate.

The government is also clearly supporting an AI revolution where AI is supposed to revolutionize the way we work and live. According to federal government rhetoric, we are a little bit ahead of the Chinese in terms of AI development, and politicians seem to support the idea of doing whatever is needed to make sure that the U.S. wins the AI race.

At the same time that we are prioritizing AI and moving everything online, we seem to be deprioritizing broadband. NTIA cut the BEAD program funding in half to save money, at the expense of building new networks that would provide solid infrastructure for the next fifty years. The Administration outright killed the Digital Equity Act, which had the goal of getting computers into people’s hands and training them how to use them.

These goals are clearly at odds with each other. Consider the Digital Equity funding. There is a huge lost opportunity cost for not giving people the tools to enter the digital world that the government wants. What is the cost to society for people who aren’t given the tools to enter the digital world? Digital equity folks can rattle off tons of stories of folks who were given help with broadband who then went on to work in a tech field, start a business, become teachers, or otherwise thrive and contribute to society.

The disparity between these policies makes no sense to me. It looks to me like the Digital Equity Act was killed for the simple reason that it had the name ‘equity’ in its title. But digital equity never had any of the connotations that politicians classify as DEI. Digital Equity has always been an effort to help people learn more about and master computer technology and broadband. It makes no sense not to have digital equity as a goal if we want everybody to be able to use AI or communicate with the government online.

The BEAD grants were trimmed back for one reason only – to save money. The new Administration sent folks into every nook and cranny of the government to find ways to save money. On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing, and I have to think that many of the cuts to government expenses are good in the long run. But BEAD was never about spending money. BEAD is an infrastructure bill. There are reams of economic studies that show that spending money on infrastructure always returns more to the economy than the cost.

Just in my part of North Carolina, there are a bunch of counties where all of the BEAD awards went to satellite broadband. Set aside that Western North Carolina is mountainous and heavily wooded, and there will be homes that won’t be able to get adequate broadband from the satellites. Set aside that many of these counties have low overall incomes and many folks won’t be able to afford the satellite broadband.

The bigger issue is that building fiber is about a lot more than just bringing broadband to homes. When counties get a fiber network, they can start to get creative to find ways to leverage a new network to improve the local economy. Satellite broadband is finally starting to deliver the broadband that the average home needs to join the modern world. But satellite broadband isn’t going to support schools. It’s not going to enable a county to attract a new factory. Satellite is not going to enable a county to seek ways to improve cellular coverage. Fiber is the infrastructure needed to help the overall community, while satellite broadband just helps customers who can afford it.

I know this is probably coming across as another rant, but I know I’m right. BEAD and the Digital Equity Act were tools that could have made a big difference in rural communities. I’m pretty sure that by killing broadband programs that AI will not be coming to the rural counties in Western North Carolina. Folks here are going to fall through the cracks because they will be unable to communicate with FEMA and other government agencies. It feels like the government is making a conscious decision to exclude Western North Carolina. I don’t think this is deliberate, but unfortunately, by pursuing misaligned priorities, that’s exactly what is happening. The current government is making far too many decisions in a vacuum without considering the bigger picture.

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.

Missed by BEAD

An article from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at the New York Law School claims that over 1 million locations were missed by the BEAD grants. They identified these as locations that are still shown as unserved and underserved on the FCC broadband maps, but which did not make it into the BEAD program.

ACLP also identified two other sources of locations that will likely not get broadband. They predict some BEAD defaults since a number of small and untested ISPs won sizable BEAD grants. They also believe there will continue to be defaults in other grant programs.

ACLP recommends that up to half of the $20 billion+ that will not be spent on BEAD grant be deposited into a BEAD Reserve Fund to be used to cover the shortfalls.

It’s a sensible idea, but unlikely to gain any momentum. It seems clear that NTIA wants to take credit for solving the rural broadband gap while also returning $20 billion to the U.S. Treasury. I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow NTIA to keep unspent monies alive once BEAD grants are awarded and NTIA makes a final announcement on non-deployment funds. The general consensus I’m hearing is that NTIA will award little or nothing to non-deployment funds.

I think ACLP is missing the bigger picture, and I think there are many millions more locations that should have rightfully been included in BEAD.

ACLP’s math starts with the assumption that the speeds reported to the FCC in the broadband maps are right. Anybody who has worked at a local level knows this is often not the case. There are a lot of ISPs that claim a speed of exactly 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps, and I believe that millions of these locations have been falsely excluded from BEAD.

Each State had a BEAD map challenge that was supposed to result in an accurate map, but that process was largely a total bust. The map challenge rules made it much easier to exclude locations from the preliminary BEAD maps than add locations. The process of proving an ISP was overstating speed capabilities in the FCC maps was nearly impossible to comply with.

Additionally, NTIA declared that licensed fixed wireless was to be treated as served as long as speeds were reported at 100/20 Mbps. In many counties I worked with for the map challenges, it became obvious that reporting by some WISPs was a joke. I remember one WISP that drew an eleven-mile radius circle around every tower and claimed the ability to serve every place in that circle. Numerous WISPs used seven- and nine-mile circles and also claimed full coverage. The irony of the NTIA ruling was that the only requirement to block off big areas from BEAD was adding CBRS spectrum to the spectrum mix. Many WISPs tell me that CBRS is an unremarkable spectrum due to the small channel sizes.

The other big category of locations that could have been covered by BEAD was low-income MDUs. The BEAD legislation suggested that States attack this issue using non-deployment funds. The number of such locations is hard to identify because many MDUs show as served in the FCC map since there is fiber nearby. But an MDU is not served until somebody is willing to invest in the inside wiring needed to bring better broadband to residents.

My guess is that the number of locations missed by BEAD is likely 6 to 7 million, much higher than the number suggested by ACLP. I have no analytical basis for that guess other than I seem to find examples of places missed by BEAD in every community I dig deeply into.

At some point, this will all come clear as folks without good broadband continue to complain to their elected officials. RDOF was supposed to fix the digital divide. BEAD was supposed to solve it. Maybe the next time will be the charm, although I’m not taking any bets on it.

Where is Congress?

One of the things that mystifies me this year is how many federal elected officials have disappeared in terms of supporting broadband. For example, there has been little talk of elected officials openly trying to stop NTIA from gutting the BEAD grant program. There’s no news about trying to force NTIA to go ahead and award grants from the Digital Equity Act. This may be happening behind the scenes, but there’s no big public news about supporting better broadband.

This is not intended as a political blog. I am truly puzzled by this big change. I fully understand that politics in DC is a mess right now. But the sudden indifference to broadband is a huge shift from just the recent past. Broadband has always been one of the few topics that has had bipartisan support from rural legislators, because they all knew that this was important to their constituents. Over the last five or ten years, I’ve heard from dozens of County governments who have said that the lack of good broadband was the number one issue for their constituents.

That message has always carried upward to federal legislators, particularly in the House of Representatives. Over the years, I’ve talked to a number of House members, or their staffs, who wanted to know more about the broadband market in their district. I can’t think of an ISP preparing to ask for a broadband grant that was unable to get a letter of support from their House member. And House members always turn up for ribbon cuttings for the launch of a new broadband network. Getting better broadband in rural communities has always been big local news, and elected officials have always participated in trying to get better broadband and celebrating it when it shows up.

The most visible political support for better broadband has come at the County level, and I know many County governments are confused and dismayed by the sudden retraction of the BEAD grant program. A lot of County Boards put a lot of effort into the BEAD process, because BEAD grant scoring rules in a lot of states rewarded ISPs that got real commitments from local politicians instead of the more common generic letter of support. County Boards were led to believe that they had some say in choosing the ISPs they wanted, since BEAD scoring gave extra points for such effort. A lot of County Boards even made tentative grant awards as matching for BEAD using local or ARPA funds, because that supported the local ISP they favored. Unfortunately, the sudden push to award BEAD to the lowest bidder means a lot of those local grants will go unused, and the ARPA funds will evaporate.

One of the most perplexing aspects of cutting BEAD funding is that the federal government is making a massive push for AI. Bringing AI into everyday life can only happen if everybody has access to good broadband. I’m truly perplexed how the government and the tech companies that are supporting them are for AI but not for spending the BEAD funding that is already in the pipeline.

A good compromise to support AI would be to let States have some or all of the non-deployment funds. It looks like that is going to be roughly half of the $45 billion allocated to BEAD. States could do a lot with that money if they were free to use it in ways they choose. It might make sense at this point to redistribute the non-deployment funds – the allocation of BEAD funds to States was based on faulty FCC maps and clearly gave some States too much money, and others not enough.

Lack of any vocal bipartisanship for broadband probably also doesn’t bode well for other needed legislation, like reforming the Universal Fund. I’m not hopeful that much will change with the BEAD funding or USF reform unless federal politicians speak up and remind NTIA and the administration that good broadband is essential for the American economy and a future that includes AI.

Who Will Still Need Broadband After BEAD?

A question I’ve been asked lately is what comes after BEAD. While BEAD will build good broadband networks in a lot of rural communities, it’s becoming clear that BEAD is not going to solve a lot of the rural broadband gap. I’ve identified categories of locations that will still need better broadband after BEAD.

BEAD Satellite Awards. I start with the premise that rural communities are not going to be happy when somebody officially tells them that the federal government is giving money to Starlink or Kuiper to solve their rural broadband gap. It’s likely that NTIA and the FCC will declare that satellite is good broadband so that they can declare that the rural broadband gap has been solved.

There are also natural limitations on the capabilities of satellite broadband. It can be difficult to deliver a satellite signal through heavy tree canopy. The signal can be blocked for customers living in the shadow of hills or mountains. There are a lot of questions about the maximum number of customers that can be served simultaneously in a given geography. But the real ongoing question will be if people and local politicians will accept satellite broadband when neighboring counties have fiber in rural places. There is also a big question of affordability.

I predict there will be a growing outcry from people from areas that got satellite from BEAD who will not accept satellite as the permanent solution.

Defaults. There will continue to be defaults for existing broadband grant programs. This year saw significant RDOF defaults from Charter and CenturyLink. There will be defaults on networks funded by ARPA grants, where funding ends at the end of 2026.

I expect BEAD defaults. When NTIA took the approach of forcing ISPs to accept less funding, many of those ISPs will realize in the future that they don’t have enough money to build the promised network.

Crappy Mapping. The biggest group of locations missed by BEAD will be due to poor FCC maps. The BEAD map challenge was a total joke. It was fairly easy for ISPs to get BEAD-eligible locations removed from the map, including many that should have stayed on. The map challenge made it practically impossible to add locations to the BEAD map where the FCC maps were in error. There are two major flaws in the FCC maps that will surface as people complain about still not having adequate broadband.

There are still numerous examples of locations that are not identified on the FCC maps. I recently talked to a cooperative in Appalachia that said there were neighboring areas where the FCC fabric missed 30% of the eligible locations. This is understandable because CostQuest relies on two primary sources of data on housing: local records and satellite images. There are many counties that still have poor records. Satellite images don’t do well in areas with total tree cover that hides roads and houses from the satellite imagery.

The bigger mapping issue is ISPs that have claimed speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster in the FCC maps but can’t deliver that speed. FCC rules allow ISPs to report marketing speeds rather than an approximation of actual speeds, so such ISPs are probably not violating any FCC rules. But while fully knowing that marketing speeds are likely exaggerated, in the grant process, we pretend that the speeds reported in the FCC maps are gospel. When the RDOF subsidy program was announced, which was to provide a subsidy to locations where speeds were less than 25/3 Mbps, the large rural telcos flooded the FCC mapping process with claims that upgraded the claimed speeds of huge numbers of locations to exactly 25/3 Mbps broadband. The FCC rejected a lot of these claims that were made on the eve of the RDOF reverse auction. When BEAD rules dictated that grants could only be made to locations where broadband speeds were less than 100/20 Mbps, many rural ISPs scrambled to claim that they could deliver exactly 100/20 Mbps.

ISPs also often overstate coverage areas in the FCC maps. An ISP is only supposed to claim locations it can connect to within ten days after a request. There are many examples of WISPs in the FCC maps that draw perfect coverage circles around a tower that ignore topography and foliage. There are many other ISPs that claim service areas that are aspirational rather than real.

The bottom line is that we will still be a long way from being able to declare the job done after the BEAD awards. To be fair, BEAD, ReConnect, ARPA, and other grants have made some huge dents in the rural broadband gap. But the day will come when the millions of people who have been left behind will make themselves heard.

NTIA’s BEAD Role

At the SCTE Tech Expo in Washington, DC, Arielle Roth, the newly seated head of NTIA, was quoted by several sources as saying, “Our role is to be good stewards of the money . . . We wouldn’t be doing our due diligence if we didn’t look under the hood and make sure that Americans aren’t on the hook for costs that would be unreasonable.”

By the looks of what NTIA has been doing, they seem to have taken cost-cutting as the primary goal of the BEAD program. First, they forced States to shave millions of locations from the BEAD-eligible list, and I believe we’re going to find out later that many millions of those locations should have gotten grants for better broadband. NTIA is now in the process of setting a cost cap for each state based on the CostQuest cost models and forcing ISPs to accept 65% or less of the state-specific cost cap.

I would agree that NTIA has a responsibility to make sure that money isn’t wasted, but that is not supposed to be its primary concern. Let me take you back to the beginning of BEAD to talk about how this was supposed to work.

Congress clearly intended for the full $45.5 billion allocated to BEAD to be spent. States were instructed to bring good broadband to every BEAD-eligible location, and the legislation included an emphasis on building fiber. Whatever wasn’t spent on infrastructure was to be used for non-deployment projects that were broadband-related. This could have encompassed a wide variety of different uses to be determined by each state. The legislation suggested uses for non-deployment funds for things like wiring urban MDUs for broadband and getting computers and other devices into the hands of those who need them. States have suggested a wide range of uses for non-deployment funds. For example, West Virginia wanted to use the funds to do a statewide pole inventory to make it easier to build fiber. South Carolina envisioned creating a statewide middle-mile network that made sure that ISPs in every rural county could buy backbone Internet for the same price as in the populous counties.

Unfortunately, NTIA got off to a bad start early when it realized how bad the FCC maps were. The whole BEAD process was delayed waiting for better maps. When they got slightly better maps, NTIA pulled the trigger and used those maps to allocate BEAD funds to states. Almost immediately, some states yelled that they didn’t get enough money, while other states realized they got more than they needed. There were policy discussions about shifting money between states after awards were made, but that never happened.

The States then went through a map challenge process. Unfortunately, the rules required by NTIA made it far easier to remove BEAD-eligible locations from the map than to add locations that should have been eligible. I know multiple counties that worked hard to show that some of the ISPs in their County were not delivering 100/20 Mbps. However, the process for proving that was nearly impossible to follow – it required convincing multiple customers of a given ISP to take speed tests multiple times per day over multiple days, and in a specific manner. The end result of the disastrous map challenge process was that millions of locations were removed from BEAD, with relatively few added.

More recently, NTIA acted to remove even more locations from BEAD. They correctly removed locations where some other grant was supposed to build better broadband. But they also made it easier for WISPs, using both licensed and unlicensed spectrum, to ask to remove locations from the BEAD map.

States were originally given a lot of latitude in how to use the funding allocated to them. But States were to act under the overarching intentions of the legislation that said they should consider fiber first. States understood that by funding relatively expensive fiber builds, they were reducing the funds that would be left for non-deployment. States had serious policy discussions of how to balance between building fiber and other needs.

But this latitude is exactly what Congress intended. They wanted BEAD to avoid the problems of RDOF, where the FCC called the shots and ended up awarding money to ISPs that should not have been funded. That draws attention to a second quote from Roth. She said that BEAD funding should go to “serious providers who are going to deliver on their promises and that we’re not going to see defaults.” I hate to be the bearer of bad news to NTIA, but by pressuring ISPs to take less grant funding to stay in BEAD, NTIA is greatly increasing the chance of future defaults. This is going to be a repeat of RDOF. ISPs will start building networks and will suffer inflation and supply chain issues, and some of them will decide that it’s better to pull the plug than to finish building a project they can’t afford, and that can’t make money. That’s the reason for the RDOF defaults in recent years – RDOF winners looked at the low amounts of award they accepted in the reverse auction and threw in the towel.

One thing is now clear with BEAD – NTIA now fully owns the program. States lost all of their latitude with BEAD, and the NTIA changed the rules after the BEAD process made it to the five-yard line. Whatever happens from here will be laid 100% at the doorstep of NTIA, and my prediction is that BEAD is not going to be talked about fondly in many parts of the country.