Steve Beining, 55, lives in a two-bedroom cabin on 140 acres in the woods of northwest Wisconsin. He bought the place from his parents during the Covid-19 pandemic, trading in a cramped apartment near the city of Appleton for endless rows of evergreens. There is only one problem: Beining, a software engineer, doesn’t have reliable internet service.
“I have to share my screen a lot for work, and I was having major latency issues,” said Beining, referring to slow loading times. The best answer would be broadband, a technology that is hard to find in many remote parts of the country.
Four years ago, the Biden administration promised 25 million people in rural America, like Beining, that they would get reliable access to the internet. But so far, the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program has yet to hook up a single customer.