The Free Press
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.
The reasons include a combination of bureaucratic sloth, the challenge of setting up brand-new governmental processes on the fly in all 50 states, and a commitment to expensive, high-quality fiber-optic cable over cheaper alternatives.
This week, Louisiana became the first state to receive final approval from the federal government to hire internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast’s Xfinity, and Cajun Broadband, which should start construction in the next 100 days. Delaware and Nevada aren’t too far behind.
But for most states, the process has been a confusing slog, and it may take them another year before they can offer new service. For instance, state broadband departments, most of which were hastily stood up after the program was announced, were required to use new maps created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine where broadband service was most needed. But the early versions of the maps were pulling in bad data, and it took months for the FCC to fix them.
“Waiting for the FCC’s updated maps added a six- to eight-month delay,” Doug Dawson, a longtime consultant for the telecom industry, told The Free Press.
“Are they [the Biden administration] concerned about the digital divide, or are they concerned about DEI?” —FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr
In addition, states had to prove that they promoted participation from minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and “other socially or economically disadvantaged individual-owned businesses.” They also had to create a Five-Year Action Plan that required collaborating with unions and “underrepresented communities,” including prisoners, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and people of color.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, told The Free Press that “woke leftist policies” woven into BEAD’s eligibility requirements contributed to the holdup.
“The shovels haven’t turned any dirt, and Americans want to know what’s going on with these policies,” Carr said. “It’s sort of a microcosm for many of these broader concerns. Are they concerned about the digital divide, or are they concerned about DEI?”
But Nathan Smith, director of economics and policy for the nonprofit Connected Nation, said the diversity, equity, and inclusion component is not surprising, since most of the bill’s supporters were Democrats. “Obviously, it’s a Democratic administration, so it has a little bit of that philosophical imprint,” he said. (The BEAD program was approved in November 2021 as part of President Joe Biden’s signature $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed in the Senate with “yes” votes from 50 Democrats and 19 Republicans.)
In a hearing on the program’s progress before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce last September, Misty Ann Giles, the director of Montana’s Department of Administration, testified that the social policy requirements “create undue complications that states and [internet] providers have never faced in other broadband programs.” Giles said the federal government’s requests were “akin to building a plane while flying it.”
Indeed, after the act passed Congress, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) scrambled to hire new employees to oversee the program. Many states lacked their own broadband departments and had to quickly create them.
“These state broadband offices are pretty new, and they’re being tasked with solving this problem that has, to some extent, flummoxed big federal agencies with lots of expertise like the FCC. So they had a hard job,” Smith said.
Complicating it all was a requirement that internet providers offer a low-cost plan—which some states set as low as $30 per month. America’s Communications Association, an industry group focusing on small and rural markets, called that figure “completely unmoored from the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest cost, hardest-to-reach areas that BEAD funding is precisely designed to reach.”
Lucas Wood-Gluck, a spokesman for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, pushed back against critics, saying BEAD is “on time and on track.” He noted that the federal government already has multiple programs providing internet service in rural and other underserved areas.
“BEAD, which is a state grant program, is the ‘clean-up batter’ in our lineup of grant-making programs, designed to serve the hardest—and most expensive—to reach areas after other federal internet infrastructure funding sources have been used,” he said via email. “It may be the largest pot of money, but it also requires the most careful planning to make sure we get it right.”
Smith of Connected Nation agreed that no other program sets out to do what BEAD is attempting: connect every American to a reliable internet source.
“Other programs didn’t have the universal goal for coverage,” Smith said. “So that’s also been a factor when it comes to delays, because if states have a great idea on how to get some areas served, but not every single unserved or underserved area, that’s not good enough in this case.”
But the welter of federal programs has led to confusion at the state level. In September 2023, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) published a Red Light Report on the BEAD program, highlighting 12 overlapping federal programs in the FCC, the Rural Utilities Service, and the NTIA with $125 billion dedicated to broadband connectivity.
“There are all these different programs funded in different ways, with different rules and timelines, and all that a resident sees is that fiber is getting deployed down their road,” Glen Howie, the state broadband director for Arkansas, told The Free Press. “It’s all over the place, much like the wild, wild West.”
One long-simmering issue involves a pretty basic question: What tech should get the bulk of the grant money? The BEAD program heavily favors fiber–optic cable, which delivers high-quality internet and has a long lifespan. But it has to be installed either aboveground on poles or by digging trenches to bury the cable—which makes it expensive.
The Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority, for instance, noted that more than 15,000 state residents and businesses are in remote and mountainous locations that would be difficult and costly to connect via fiber.
Only last August did the NTIA seek public input regarding funding for cheaper alternatives such as “low Earth orbit” satellites (SpaceX’s Starlink, for example) or radio spectrum that is open for public use, like Wi-Fi.
Diane Rinaldo, the former acting administrator of the NTIA during President Donald Trump’s first term, told The Free Press that construction projects to lay fiber could take years to complete. “For some of these fiber projects, it’s still going to take an additional four years, so that’s seven years out from when the legislation passed,” Rinaldo said. “Are we providing our kids or our grandkids with internet at that point?”
Rinaldo noted an advantage to technologies like “low Earth orbit” broadband. “You launch more satellites into orbit, and then you have additional coverage.”
On the other hand, Gary Bolton, president of the Fiber Broadband Association, in a column for Lightwave, said that satellites are good for emergencies but aren’t adequate when the number of regular users starts to rise.
“According to their FCC filings, to get to ‘fiber-like performance’ and gigabit speeds, SpaceX needs to launch 30,000 more larger satellites,” wrote Bolton.
Two of the three states that are furthest along in the process have chosen to provisionally award alternative technology companies with BEAD funds. Nevada granted Amazon’s Project Kuiper almost $14.5 million to serve over 4,800 locations, and Louisiana has more than $28 million in BEAD funds set to be awarded to a yet-to-be-named alternative technology provider to service almost 3,000 locations.
Even after construction starts, new blind spots could come to the forefront, noted Howie. “There’s an affordability issue. So even if you make Arkansas the most wired state in the country and run fiber to every single location in Arkansas, if some of our folks can’t afford it, that’s something we still have to work through.”
There’s also the elephant in the room—what are President-elect Trump’s plans for the BEAD program after he takes office? Senator Cruz foreshadowed a reckoning come January 20 in a letter sent to NTIA administrator Alan Davidson late last year. “With anticipated new leadership at both NTIA and in Congress, the BEAD program will soon be ‘unburdened by what has been,’ and states will no longer be subject to the unlawful and onerous bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the Biden-Harris NTIA.”
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