Politico ran an article earlier this month by John Hendel that noted the slow pace of the BEAD grant program. It’s a newsworthy topic because during the current election cycle I’ve heard Democrats mention fixing rural broadband as one of their accomplishments.

There is one paragraph in that article that instantly caught my eye. The government is executing BEAD “on the 10-year timeline Congress intended,” a spokesperson for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency tasked with overseeing the program, told POLITICO.

This is the first time I’ve heard that BEAD was intended to be a 10-year plan. I can recall numerous occasions during the BEAD process when the public was told that the goal was to solve rural broadband. I sat through numerous public meetings where State Broadband offices met with the public and the message was always that rural broadband is a huge problem and the goal was to start fixing it as quickly as is practical.

There were a lot of other big infrastructure programs funded by the IIJA that are moving faster than BEAD. Consider the Bridge Investment Program (BIP). This is a $40 billion program for bridge replacement, rehabilitation, preservation, and protection. The U.S. Department of Transportation started to accept BIP grant applications in December 2023. That’s roughly a year faster than BEAD. There are many other examples of spending that have already been made from the same infrastructure legislation.

I have a hard time believing that it’s faster and easier create the engineering studies needed to build or fix a bridge than it is to design a broadband network. Any local government that applied for a BIP bridge grant will already have done the detailed engineering analysis needed to quantify the amount of grant needed.

Unfortunately, BEAD is almost turning into a 10-year program. States will be making BEAD awards starting sometime in 2025. A State can’t make a grant award until they find an ISP to serve every unserved and underserved location and also gotten NTIA approval for the full pile of awards. I don’t expect more than perhaps a few token customers to be connected to a BEAD-constructed network in 2025. ISPs will have up to four years after grant contracts have been signed. This means that if everything works as planned, some BEAD projects won’t be completed until sometime in 2029 – the eighth year after the BEAD program was created by Congress.

There would have been a huge outcry inside the industry and from the rural politicians if NTIA had formally announced years ago that BEAD was intended to be a 10-year grant program. There have been countless opportunities for NTIA to have made this claim, and it is only now arising in a quote given to a reporter from a political site. We can’t know who provided the quote to Politco, but if this is an official line, then NTIA is throwing up a smoke screen to cover for the slowness of the program. It’s disappointing to know that a rural household without good broadband will see a student who was in the sixth grade when BEAD was announced graduate from high school without seeing any improvement from the BEAD program.