Tag Archives: BEAD

A Lesson Not Learned

Decades ago, I was lucky to have interviewed a number of rural people who told me what it was like when they finally got electricity. Almost every person I talked to mentioned how life-changing it was to brightly illuminate their homes with electric lightbulbs.

Other than that, everybody’s electricity story varied according to their economic circumstances and priorities. Wiring a home with electricity was a big expense for a lot of folks, and many got loans from their electric coop to help pay for wiring and appliances. Others introduced wiring gradually as their budget would allow. Farmers often lit their barns before their homes. The most valued and first appliances bought by many homes were washing machines and refrigerators.

People also told me about the frustration of waiting for decades to get electricity that was available in the county seat or other nearby towns. They said that most adult children left the farm, attracted by the lure and conveniences of electricity. They described how access to electricity clearly defined a world of haves and have-nots.

Rural electricity was largely funded by low-income loans to newly formed electric cooperatives. Electricity to the farm enabled the agricultural revolution that made the U.S. the breadbasket of the world. Rural electricity immediately raised the standard of living for rural residents and gave them the same opportunities as everybody else. I’m not sure how to do the math, but electrifying rural America was probably the best infrastructure investment that the U.S. Government ever made – rivaled perhaps only by the interstate highway system.

We took a different approach to stringing telephone copper in rural areas, with a mix of private and public investment. In 1900 there were over 3,000 telephone companies in the country – many of them in small towns and rural areas. Many of the rural networks were built and financed by farmers, but a huge amount of rural copper was also funded by government loans given to small telephone companies and newly formed rural telephone cooperatives.

Since it’s now clear that broadband is the newest utility that homes need to participate in today’s economy, the federal government naturally got involved in funding rural fiber networks. Some of this was funded with subsidized loans, but a lot more has been accomplished through federal grant programs like RDOF, ReConnect, and the Capital Projects Fund. The BEAD program was supposed to be the big grant program that filled in the final gaps in rural fiber – and many State Broadband Offices were well on the way to fulfilling that goal.

I’ve never understood why and how we lost the lessons we learned in the past. I am certain that a lot of rural America would already have fiber today if the federal government had offered 40- or 50-year loans at 1%. Electric and telephone cooperatives would have gladly taken that money to expand fiber networks across regions. Some of the big telcos would have taken the money. I am certain that new cooperatives would have been formed in areas where there were no logical recipients of the loans. Just like with electrification, the vast majority of these loans would be repaid, meaning there would be very little net cost to the government to fund rural fiber through loans.

Instead, the FCC chopped the rural landscape into Swiss cheese areas with the RDOF program, and other grant programs have tried to fit fiber projects around the messy jigsaw puzzle that was left over. I’m not sure that we could have designed a worse way to mess up the rural broadband landscape.

We’ve now suddenly decided that it’s too expensive to build rural fiber – even though we were near the finish line with BEAD. And to be fair to the critics of BEAD, it is expensive to give away billions in grants. But once we started down the grant pathway instead of the loan pathway, BEAD was the logical conclusion to the effort.

It’s sad we didn’t remember the lesson we learned from electrification. The best solution for stringing a wired network in rural areas is to loan the money to local companies who have a vested interest in making it work for the long haul.

States: Don’t Give up on MDUs

As States look ahead to how they’ll use BEAD funds beyond broadband infrastructure deployment, one key area of opportunity is emerging: supporting underserved multi-dwelling units (MDUs). The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) singles out a funding opportunity for MDUs where a “substantial share” of units lack adequate internet access or are in low-income communities.

While States have already received NTIA approval for how they plan to use non-deployment funds, there is a good chance that the upcoming revised Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) might narrow States to only using funding for purposes specifically allowed in the Act. If that happens, States may be invited to revise their Initial or Final Proposals, giving them a valuable opportunity to rethink and refine their funding strategies.

This blog is a plea for States not to give up on the opportunity to use non-deployment funds to bring better wired-broadband to affordable housing MDUs. Landlords of affordable housing MDUs face a chicken-and-egg dilemma – many affordable housing MDUs don’t have good broadband because the tenants can’t afford to pay market rates for broadband.

The affordable rates needed for success will vary according to the incomes of tenants. In the MDUs that serve residents with the lowest incomes, prices will have to be in the range of $10 to $15 per month. There are affordable housing MDUs where incomes are higher, but generally still not high enough for tenants to afford normal market rates for broadband.

The MDU solution for States to consider is to wire MDUs with fiber or Category 6 cable to enable gigabit speeds within apartments. States should support wired solutions instead of funding  building-wide Wi-Fi, which will not meet the requirements of a served technology and is notoriously inconsistent (has anybody ever loved the Wi-Fi they get in a hotel?)

There are a number of reasons for States to consider this use of any remaining BEAD funding to wire affordable housing and other underserved MDUs.

It’s a lot more affordable to wire buildings than States probably assume. I’ve been doing research with the vendors and technologies used to wire MDUs. My analysis that the cost to retrofit a typical 72-unit MDU complex with Category 6 wire ranges from $300 to $630 per unit. Wiring with fiber costs a little more, and ranges from $450 to $800 per unit. It cost a lot more to wire buildings a decade ago, but modern wiring technologies and techniques have significantly reduced the cost.

It is also getting increasingly easier to find ISPs willing to work with landlords to bring affordable broadband when it’s needed. If the landlord takes on all of the rewiring and infrastructure costs inside an MDU, then ISPs need only bring a fiber connection to the MDU. The cost of a bulk-billed wholesale fiber connection can be made affordable when ISPs and landlords step outside of the industry norm. Most ISPs operate on rolling 3-year contracts for selling to businesses (ISPs view an MDU as a business customer). For example, ISPs and landlords both get a huge benefit by considering ten or even twenty-year contracts for a fiber connection – landlords get lower costs and ISPs eliminate churn.

Because of the affordable cost of rewiring buildings for high-speed broadband, States can do a whole lot of good for a relatively small investment. Even if States pay 100% of the cost to rewire MDUs (and there is no particular reason they should pay 100%), the cost per family to bring better broadband to MDUs is a tiny fraction of the cost to serve a rural family with any broadband solution. BEAD originally held out a hope that it could help to solve the MDU broadband gap, and with non-deployment funds, some of that promise can still be kept.

Administration Killing the Digital Equity Act

Last week, President Trump called for the end of the $2.75 billion in grants from the Digital Equity Act. The funding was approved as part of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The purpose of the program was to help close the broadband adoption gap by helping people learn how to use computers and to navigate the Internet. The grants were to be distributed in two ways. The State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program reserved $1.44 for States to distribute through grants. The NTIA was slow in getting this program running, and grants were supposed to be launched starting in 2022. The NTIA finally announced $840 million in funding for States in 2024. It doesn’t appear that very much of this funding has been turned into grant awards.

The second part of the program was for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program that is administered directly by NTIA. The budget for this grant program was $1.25 billion, with 5% reserved for Native Entities, and 1% set aside for territories. The program was supposed to award $250 million per year in grants from 2022 until 2026. The NTIA was also slow in launching this program, but finally announced $619 in awards in January of this year. It seems certain that those awards will never get inked. There has been money awarded to states, but it’s not clear how much of that might have actually flowed to states since this seems to be a reimbursement grant program.

It’s a shame that almost none of this money has already been used. If NTIA had met the Congressional time line and intentions, 60% of the grants would already have been awarded in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The NTIA has defended the slow speed of the BEAD grant program, but Congress clearly intended for this money to flow quickly. I’m sure we’ll hear about how hard it was to make this work, but I have to think States would have been able to give their portion of this away if they had been given the money years ago. I remember a lot of non-profits that were already making plans to ask for this grant funding in 2021.

It’s hard to deny that there is a computer literacy gap in the country. I can’t find a specific definition of computer literacy, and different sources estimate the number of adults who are not computer literate between 30 million and 50 million. This program was part of the BEAD process that wanted to make sure that rural folks who don’t know how to use computers can take advantage of the expansion of rural broadband that is supposed to be coming from BEAD. The industry is still waiting to find out the status of the $42.5 billion in broadband grants, and seeing this program and ReConnect grants killed in the same week isn’t give anybody a warm and fuzzy feeling.

The President’s announcement said this funding is illegal, which is an odd stance since this was approved by Congress, which seems to be the very definition of legal. This cancellation announcement was not unexpected due move to kill all federal programs and activities that are considered to be DEI. It’s not clear how this is a DEI program other than the name of the grant program contains the word equity.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the White House’s ability to kill grant programs that were created by Congress, and there are already a slew of lawsuits concerning other federal grants that have been cancelled or put on hold. A quick web search shows lawsuits associated with cancelled grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities, USAID, NIH research grants,  Covid-19 public health grants, and others.

There is always the chance that Congress will insist that these grants proceed, but recent lack of Congressional action probably means there is little chance of that.

Tariff Uncertainty

This is a blog about uncertainty because it’s hard to know what else to say about the impact of tariffs on the broadband industry – other than we know there will be an impact. Right now, the tariff situation is in utter turmoil. Every ISP I talked to about the issue had the same concerns. They are all hoping for certainty. They can deal with price increases, but they can’t deal with not knowing the situation for building a year from now.

ISPs generally plan a year ahead. The networks they are building now were planned in 2024, and many ISPs are paralyzed about what to plan for 2025. I’ve been through other periods of economic uncertainty during my career, and every time, the most common reaction to uncertainty from ISPs has been to take a pause until the uncertainty ended. If the tariff situation doesn’t soon become predictable, I would expect 2025 construction to slow significantly, particularly for smaller ISPs.

The first place I would normally go to get a feel about the impact of any big changes for the whole industry is to see what big ISPs have to say about it. The big ISPs have quarterly earnings calls, and Wall Street expects them to talk about expected changes in their company in the next quarter and next year. I listened to the recent earnings calls for Comcast, Charter, and T-Mobile, and the companies were all coy and noncommittal on the tariff topic.

Perhaps the easiest way to think about tariffs is by industry segment. I’ve been thinking about what will happen if tariffs settle in at something like the original announcement of 10% tariffs across the board.

Fiber ISPs would probably have the smallest impact of tariffs – but it’s not zero. Fiber is made domestically. Fiber electronics will be shielded from tariffs to some extent since the major electronics vendors established US manufacturing to prepare for BEAD grants. But those factories still rely on some imported components. Perhaps the biggest impact will come for non-grant construction since those ISPs have continued to buy cheaper imported electronics. It will be interesting to see if the new U.S. factories can supply everybody. I suspect they can’t. But even if they can, U.S. electronics are more expensive than the imported electronics before tariffs.

Cable companies are not going to be so lucky. Companies like CommScope and Vecima Networks that make cable electronics have already said they will have big hits from tariffs. We’ll have to see if this results in a slowdown of upgrades of cable networks to DOCSIS 4.0 or mid-splits. Day-to-day components like settop boxes are mostly manufactured overseas.

WISPs and cellular carriers are likely to see a hit from tariffs since most of their electronics are imported. There are American makers of towers and related equipment. Cellphone prices would increase from tariffs, but for now those tariffs have been reversed.

All ISPs are going to see a hit on WiFi gear, which is almost all imported.

ISPs and carriers buy a lot of vehicles, and it looks like the cost of new vehicles will be climbing.

The surprising increases are going to come on the little stuff like the small hardware needed for all kinds of network construction. The worry is not just that those prices might climb, but that there will be supply chain interruptions.

Any ISP that is building a network funded by grant dollars has to be worried since grants awarded in past years will not be increased, and the ISP will have to absorb the full impact of tariff increases. I have to wonder if this will put more pressure on defaults for RDOF and other previous grants if ISPs see grant projects becoming unviable. I won’t be shocked if some of the companies winning BEAD grants change their mind by the time they are asked to sign a grant contract later this year.

The bottom line is that uncertainty is not good for the industry, and I think the reactions we’ll be seeing from ISPs will be more a reaction to uncertainty than to cost increases.

Technology Equality

There was an article published last week by Dr. Christopher Ali in Tech Policy.Press that asks if we should be making widespread broadband grants to Starlink and other low-orbit satellite technologies. Dr. Ali is Professor of Telecommunications in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State.

I highly recommend reading his paper. I was particularly taken by his conclusion. He says, “There is an important difference between technological neutrality and technological equality. LEO and fiber are not equal, and any policy that treats them as such will widen the very divide we have spent decades trying to bridge.”

I have been making this same observation about almost every grant program in the last decade, but just not as eloquently as Ali. As Ali points out, his comments are not a criticism of Starlink. Like him, I’ve talked to dozens of rural folks who absolutely rave about Starlink. For rural households, finally getting access to working broadband twenty years after the rest of the country has been a revelation. They can finally work at home, join Teams calls, and take online classes – things that the vast majority of Americans take for granted. Starlink should absolutely be a part of BEAD to reach remote locations, but should it be deployed to other locations?

Ali’s real issue is with the folks who set grant rules. Consider BEAD. The rules were established in 2020, and grants were not expected then to be finally completed until the end of 2028. Consider how much broadband has changed in the country just between 2020 and 2025.

  • In 2020, Ookla said the median broadband speed in the country was 86 Mbps download and 12 Mbps upload. In March of this year, Ookla says that median broadband speeds in the country has increased to 287 Mbps download and 53 Mbps upload.
  • In the second quarter of 2020, OpenVault said the average U.S. household used 359 gigabytes per month of download data and 25 gigabytes of upload data. OpenVault says at the end of 2024 that consumption had grown to 652 gigabytes of download and 46 gigabytes of upload.

The policy folks who set the BEAD rules set the broadband target performance for BEAD just a hair above the national average broadband performance in 2020. We’re only half way to the completion of BEAD grant construction and the country has already more than doubled the 2020 national broadband speeds and consumption. It’s not a stretch to predict that by 2028 the average U.S. home will be consuming more than a terabyte of data each month.

If the authors of the BEAD grant rules had looked just a decade forward, they would have set the BEAD performance standard to something like 400/100 Mbps. It doesn’t seem like a big policy stretch to think that valuable grant money ought to build networks that match the average market performance when they are completed. As Ali mentions, the biggest issue with LEO satellites isn’t even speeds, but capacity. Will the LEO companies be able to provide broadband to the many millions of households who will have no other broadband options?

It’s obvious why the folks in Congress picked wimpy BEAD standards. They are politicians and were under tremendous pressure from ISPs to not be excluded from BEAD dollars – and even under more pressure to not declare cable company networks as underserved. I remember the furor from cable companies in 2020 that lobbied hard against the BEAD upload speed requirement of 20 Mbps. That was because, at that time, most of them had upload speeds closer to 10 Mbps. It’s amazing what only five years of market pressure has done, and cable companies are upgrading urban upload speeds to 100+ Mbps with quick mid-split upgrades and have plans to get to gigabit upload speeds with DOCSIS 4.0.

WISPs didn’t have the same market power as cable companies in 2020, but they fought hard to make sure that the requirement for BEAD didn’t climb above 100 Mbps. But after only five years, they got access to a lot of new spectrum and can buy gear that will deliver 500 Mbps or faster broadband.

As ALI points out, LEO technology barely meets the 2020 definition of broadband that was codified in BEAD, and it is not a forward-looking technology – it is not equal to fiber or even to fixed wireless. And yet, the NTIA is doing mental gymnastics using an argument about technology neutrality to give more money to satellite technology. Perhaps the critics of satellite technology will be proven wrong, and satellite providers will improve technology so that by 2028, they will be delivering forward-looking speeds and coverage. But if not, we’ll be making grant awards in 2025 to implement 2020 broadband.

An Industry on Hold

I keep seeing articles or podcasts every week speculating on what the new administration and Congress might change in the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program. This all seems like speculation to me since only a few people really know what might happen, and I don’t think they are talking. I don’t think any of the pundits know any more about what will happen to BEAD than what I included in a tongue-in-cheek blog last year that included a BEAD bingo card.

There is one thing that definitely has occurred. A large chunk of the industry that was expecting to participate in BEAD is largely on hold.

That obviously includes the many ISPs that have filed or plan to file BEAD applications. There is a huge amount of speculation that any significant changes to BEAD will mean repeating the BEAD application processes in the three states that have already announced awards and the twenty-plus with open BEAD grant windows.

While State Broadband Offices are marching forward with the BEAD process, they are all spending a lot of energy speculating on what they might have to rework – and worrying that they’ll not have enough money to do this all a second time.

The group feeling the most pain are the vendors expecting to sell to BEAD grant winners. This group already had a let-down when many of them guessed at the beginning of 2024 that there would be BEAD grants made last year. They now see the process entering April 2025 with no idea of when grants will be made and when ISPs might start ordering equipment. The one thing they are now seeing is that the money might be finally get released for a lot of states at the same time instead of BEAD awards dribbling out over a year.

Another group that is getting very concerned is elected officials in counties across the country. A lot of counties devoted significant resources participating in the BEAD process. Many states gave counties some power in choosing BEAD winners by giving a lot of grant points for local endorsement and local funding. A lot of counties have made broadband grants to ISPs that are contingent on them winning BEAD – and many of those grants are from ARPA funding that has a ticking time clock and expiration date. There are also a lot of rumors flying around that the federal government might claw back unspent APRA funds.

Everybody is on hold for the big decision of how much BEAD funding will go to satellite. Will it be 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, or 80%? I’ve heard industry pundits making all of these guesses. That split is vitally important to both the ISPs and the vendors. The group most worried about this is local elected officials, who almost universally want fiber built in their counties.

The other big question that has everybody in knots is how much of the process can be changed by NTIA versus what needs to come from Congress. There is legislation still in the early stages in the House that addresses the issues, with other lawmakers drafting alternate ideas. While Congress could act quickly on this if they want to, they have a lot of other big issues on their plate right now.

Interestingly, the first Congressional bill on the issue is called the SPEED Act, but none of this is feeling very speedy. But who knows? Edicts could come down quickly and State Broadband Offices could issue grants quickly if there isn’t a lot of paperwork involved in reshuffling the rules. Meanwhile, my original BEAD bingo card is still intact.

Will Anybody Care About Broadband Maps?

We just spent a few years agonizing over the FCC broadband maps. The reasons we’ve cared is easy to understand. The FCC maps were first used to allocate BEAD funding to states. States that spent a lot of time to clean up the maps seem to have gotten a better share of the BEAD funding, while other states were badly shorted. The concept behind using the maps for this purpose made sense – but only if the maps were relatively accurate in different regions of the country.

The FCC maps became even more important as states conducted BEAD map challenges. These challenges were to define which specific homes get BEAD (and which ones don’t). In some states the map challenge has seen a lot of participation from ISPs and local communities, but in many states the process didn’t see a lot of vigorous challenges.

We’ll soon be at the end of the BEAD map challenges, and that makes me wonder if anybody will ever care about the FCC maps after this. The original purpose of the FCC maps was for the FCC to count homes with and without broadband. The maps have been terrible at this since they were first introduced for the simple reason that the FCC presumes that self-reported speeds from ISPs reflect the real-world speeds available to people. The FCC definition of broadband is currently 100/20 Mbps, and there are a lot of ISPs that miraculously claim that as the speed of their networks in the FCC maps.

It’s hard to think of any motivation for the FCC to make the maps better. The agency can accept the speeds reported by ISPs, and once BEAD grants are awarded and RDOF areas start being built, the FCC can claim with a fairly straight face that all of rural America has broadband. At that point, the FCC is likely going to declare job done. For the last decade, the FCC has issued annual broadband reports to Congress that have said that the state of broadband is good and is improving – all based upon maps that everybody knows grossly overstate both broadband speeds and coverage. I can’t see any future motivation for the FCC to highlight that there are still homes without good broadband.

This will be even easier if the FCC decides that Starlink and Kuiper are broadband. It won’t matter if the satellite companies have a limit on the number of customers they can serve – the FCC can decide to accept their speed claims at any given home.

The FCC has options if they are ever motivated to really measure broadband coverage. They could start by eliminating the ability of ISPs to claim marketing speeds instead of some approximation of actual speeds. The FCC could get serious about enforcing coverage claims of where an ISP can meet the 10-day installation rule. The FCC could compare Ookla or other speed tests against the speeds claimed by ISPs – and the FCC could challenge ISPs where claimed speeds are far higher than speed tests. I don’t see the FCC ever being willing to get that aggressive with ISPs – and this process would be extremely contentious.

I’m positive that when BEAD is over, the FCC and everybody else will lose interest in the broadband maps. I also believe that we’ll still have millions of rural homes without a good broadband option. I predict that states that still want to solve the remaining broadband gaps will revert to creating their own state maps like they did before BEAD. But for the most part, rural broadband will be claimed to be solved – until the day comes when the FCC is forced to increase the definition of broadband speed again – and then we’ll start all over.

Technology Neutral

The term technology neutral has been around for a number of years related to federal grants. The first program that included the term that I remember was RDOF, although it likely was used earlier. The term is used among the folks who create grant programs as a way to not dictate technology choices – any technology that can meet the requirements of a given grant program should be considered.

The term is taking on significant new meaning in the BEAD grant process. The BEAD legislation said that the BEAD program was supposed to be technology neutral. However, the NTIA adopted a principle that States should favor fiber whenever possible, while acknowledging that other technologies are going to be needed to reach everybody.

Interestingly, most States did not need to be prodded in the direction of fiber. State broadband programs that were in place before BEAD largely favored fiber, even though some funding was made to other technologies like fixed wireless. If you examine the grant awards made by States from the Capital Project Funds, the large majority of awards went to fiber.

It makes sense that States have favored fiber because that’s what they’ve heard from elected officials around their state. I’ve worked with dozens of counties in the last few years, and every one of them is hoping to get rural fiber. They have become convinced that this is the technology that will carry them for the next fifty years.

It’s not hard to understand the reasons for the preference for fiber. If we go back even a few years, preferring fiber was clearly the best goal for most counties. Fixed wireless technology has gotten magnitudes better in the last few years, but the radios that were available five years ago did not compare well to the capability of fiber. FWA cellular wireless is also new to the rural market and didn’t exist before a few years ago. Nobody took satellite broadband seriously a few years ago because almost every part of the country had long waiting lists for folks hoping to get satellite service.

It’s clear that the new head of the NTIA is going to eliminate the NTIA’s preference for fiber. The NTIA had already started down that road over the last half year in making it easier for States to make BEAD awards to alternate technologies.

The question that every State broadband office is getting tired of being asked is if they are still going to be allowed to make awards to build fiber, and if so, under what parameters. Will the NTIA dictate specific rules for choosing fiber or will it modify the guidelines on how to evaluate alternate technologies?

There will be a lot of pushback from States if they can’t build much fiber, because governors and state officials have been promising to build as much fiber as possible. A large number of counties have made local matching grants to ISPs that are proposing to build fiber.

To a large degree, any significant change that limit the amount of fiber that will be built by BEAD feels like a political decision more than a policy decision. That’s interesting because the biggest recurring theme I’ve witnessed in the push for better rural broadband is that it has been nonpartisan everywhere. I remember being at a County Board meeting five years ago when the Board members joked that it was a pleasure to finally be working on a topic where they all agreed.

Nobody knows how BEAD will change. There are parts of the program that every ISP would like to see changed. However, there are a lot of county and state officials hoping to see fiber being funded, as was done in the recently announced awards in Louisiana.

USTelecom’s 2025 Wish List

Jonathan Spalter, the President and CEO of USTelecom wrote an open letter to the White House and Congress with its wish list for government action in  2025. USTelecom is the trade association and lobbying arm representing the biggest telcos and cable companies. The most interesting thing about the list is that most smaller ISPs will agree with almost everything on it.

Champion Networks of the Future. This asks the federal government to make it easier to tear down copper telco networks. It’s an interesting request because, for the most part, the big telcos are already doing this. They are really asking the federal government to intercede in states that want to see customers provided with an alternative option for basic communications before they lose a copper telephone line.

Secure and Reform Universal Service. USTelecom recognizes that the existence of the Universal Service Fund is in jeopardy due to open court cases that could kill or maim it. This is a request for Congress to pass legislation that reinforces the mission of the USF and that also fixes the broken funding mechanism that gets funding today from telephone services.

Put the Pedal to the Metal on Broadband Deployment. This is support for moving quickly with BEAD grants while relaxing some of the BEAD rules such as requiring low rates. The big ISPs assume a lot of this funding will go to them. Some of the reforms that USTelecom wants can be done by NTIA, but others will need action by Congress.

Review All Legacy Regulations. USTelecom asks to eliminate outdated regulations and reporting, a reasonable request. Unfortunately, some of the silliest outdated requirements come from Congress and legislation is needed to kill some old requirements.

Break the Federal Permitting Log Jam. This has been on the list for twenty years. Getting permits on federal land can be nearly impossible. There has been announcements from the last several White Houses that supposedly addressed the issue but that haven’t resulted in any meaningful change.

Model Efficient, Effective Cybersecurity. This is the hardest wish to accomplish and undoubtedly comes from the recent Chinese hacking of our telecom networks. I have to wonder if this is too big of a challenge to fix with centralized government edicts – and if telcos really want the government telling them how to handle cybersecurity. But it definitely must be addressed.

What’s interesting is what is not on this list. There is no request to eliminate heavy FCC regulation, because the big telcos already know they now have a friendly FCC.

A BEAD Bingo Card

It seems like everybody I talk to has a different prediction on the forward trajectory of BEAD grant spending. The reality is that nobody has a handle on this yet since the people who will be making these decisions are not going to be in a position to do so until sometime next year.  While this doesn’t exactly make a bingo card, it’s a wild range of possibilities. I’m also curious to hear from readers if I’ve missed any likely possibilities.

Nothing Will Change. Louisiana has announced grant awards and a few more states are likely to do so soon. A lot of states will have open grant portals over the next two months. Since the grants are finally moving, BEAD will be allowed to play out.

NTIA Puts BEAD on Hold. A new NTIA leader puts everything on hold to give Congress time to consider changes.

BEAD Proceeds as Planned, but Implementation Made Easier. NTIA will let the current grant process move forward, but Congress / NTIA will kill a lot of the implementation provisions before it’s time to build the networks.

States that Haven’t Made Awards Will Be Pressured to Give More to Satellite. NTIA will let the grant process continue but will change the high-cost area rules to force more funding for satellite.

Even States That Made Awards Will Have to Revise for More Satellite. Every State, including those that already announced grants, will have to reshuffle to award high-cost locations for satellite.

Allocation Dollars by State Will Be Reshuffled. There has been a lot of grumbling that some states got too much money and others not nearly enough. Congress could grab all extra funding, known as non-deployment funds, and send it to the states that were shorted in the original allocation.

Non-Deployment Funds Will Be Clawed Back. All BEAD funds not specifically needed for BEAD infrastructure will be returned to Treasury.

BEAD is Repurposed for Satellite and Little Else. The size of BEAD funding is significantly reduced, and most of the smaller fund goes for satellite.

BEAD is Completely Killed. Congress declares that satellite broadband coverage is ubiquitous and the country no longer has a digital divide. They cancel BEAD completely. There are those who argue that the funding has already been irrevocably given to states, so this would result in a big state/federal fight over claw backs.

Future Digital Equity Grants Will Get Cancelled. NTIA will announce some digital equity grants before January 20, but other future State and federal grants will be canceled.

All Digital Equity Grants will Be Cancelled. All digital equity grants will be canceled. Some of this money has already been given to states, so another big fight.