The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) says it has been awarded a $5.58 million federal broadband grant to help expand affordable fiber access to the rural and underserved parts of its service territory in The Granite State.

According to a cooperative announcement, NHEC officials say the New Hampshire Office of Broadband Initiatives has awarded it a $5.58 million grant courtesy of the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.

New Hampshire was originally allocated $196.5 million from the BEAD program (which included non-deployment funds), but the federal allocation was later adjusted to $18.6 million after significant unpopular changes by the Trump administration that eliminated affordability requirements and shifted a significant amount of funds from fiber to Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite venture. (NTIA has not yet released guidance on BEAD non-deployment funds).

NHEC’s $5.58 million chunk of BEAD funding will be used to bring 126 miles of new fiber to 2,500 homes and businesses across 23 rural communities, including Bath, Benton, Clarksville, Colebrook, Danbury, Dixville, Goshen, Grafton, Groton, Haverhill, Hill, Holderness, Lyman, Moultonborough, New Hampton, Orange, Orford, Piermont, Springfield, Thornton, Tuftonboro, Warren, and Wentworth.

A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reveals what’s been obvious to broadband deployment experts for years now: the federal government’s multi-agency approach to closing the digital divide is undermined by a lack of coordination and data-management among agencies.

The result is an FCC broadband coverage map with an amalgamation of inaccuracies that misrepresents where high-speed Internet service does or does not exist, a flaw that can steer taxpayer dollars away from communities that actually need them.

Since 2020, four federal agencies — the FCC, NTIA, USDA and Treasury — have been administering nine different grant programs to build-out new Internet networks in unserved and underserved areas across the nation, including the $42.5 billion federal flagship BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment) program.

As ILSR’s Senior GIS Analyst Christine Parker notes, the report devotes considerable attention to “de-duplication” — the process of cross-referencing which locations have already received funding or service commitments from one program so that other programs don't waste money doubling up, or worse, leave locations out entirely because it was wrongly assumed to be covered elsewhere.

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“But there’s no documented process or timeline for actually doing this,” Parker says.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Part of the problem, the report notes, is that agencies track and report funding data in different formats, with some programs collecting far more granular location-level detail than others so that it is much harder to reconcile the datasets and match them up. GAO indicates the agencies are aware of the issue and are working to reconcile it, but as of the report’s release, no consistent process was in place.

Researchers say they’re concerned that a massive influx of new federal grant money being redirected to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband company in Ohio will be thwarted by the simple fact that many targeted locations don’t have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky.

Tom Reid of Reid Consulting conducted a study earlier this year taking a closer look at the 30,000 locations in Ohio that are poised to receive subsidized service from Starlink, and found that as many as 70 percent of the target locations were covered by tree canopy preventing the minimum 110-degree field of view Starlink dishes require.

“Only about 30 percent of the households awarded in the state of Ohio have a clear enough view of the sky to get a good, stable Starlink signal,” Reid recently told local Ohio public media.

Ohio is slated to receive $793 million in federal Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants to fund fiber expansion. But after the Trump NTIA last year changed the program to benefit Elon Musk, Starlink quickly became the biggest state beneficiary of public tax money, receiving more than $51.6 million in grants.

The Trump administration’s changes not only eliminated affordability and equitable deployment requirements, they directed millions of dollars away from higher-capacity future-proof fiber, and toward the back pocket of a billionaire who had already planned to deploy the LEO satellite network without subsidization.

Paulding Putnam Electric Cooperative (PPEC) says it has received $13.2 million in federal broadband grant support to help fund a major fiber-to-the-home expansion to rural unserved segments of northeast Indiana.

According to a cooperative announcement, the co-op will receive $13.2 million in BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) federal grant funding from the Indiana Broadband Office, matched by $10.3 million in cooperative investment, to bring affordable fiber to thousands of unserved residents in Allen, Adams, DeKalb and Noble counties.

PPEC’s fiber network passes more than 18,600 locations in Ohio and Indiana, with the cooperative having formally launched its major expansion project last year.

"This investment will make a lasting difference for the communities we serve," PPEC CEO Randy Price said of the grant award. "Reliable, high-speed internet has become a necessity for education, healthcare, agriculture, business, and everyday life. Many of our members have waited far too long for access to dependable broadband. With support from the BEAD program, we're able to accelerate fiber deployment and deliver a long-term solution that will benefit our members and strengthen our communities well into the future.”

In deployed fiber markets, the cooperative offers symmetrical 250 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $60 a month; symmetrical 500 Mbps fiber for $80 a month; and symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber for $120 a month, with a variety of additional phone, Wi-Fi, and battery-backup add-on options.

Persistent attacks by the federal government on Internet affordability protections and social safety nets are directly resulting in a drop in overall broadband adoption, with large numbers of low-income Americans unable to afford modern connectivity — and the vast benefits it provides.

That was the message sent by local and national broadband researchers attending an informational meeting last month in Indiana, Pennsylvania before the Pennsylvania House Communications & Technology Committee.

Researchers noted that sustained efforts by the federal government across numerous fronts — from attacks on the social safety net to the Republican destruction of the FCC Affordable Connectivity Program (which provided $30 broadband discounts to more than 23 million households) are directly driving vulnerable populations away from Internet adoption.

Attendees noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) alone — which dramatically lowered taxes for U.S. corporations and the wealthy — is projected to reduce broadband connections by approximately 233,000 in Pennsylvania's lowest income quintile.

One attendee, Indiana County Commissioner Sherene Hess, pointed to 2024 data from public-benefit corporation Ready.net showing that Indiana County is among the least-connected counties in Pennsylvania, with 22 percent of county locations without broadband access.

According to notoriously unreliable FCC data (coverage and speed gaps are usually worse than the federal government claims), of the 103,986 “serviceable locations” in Indiana County, 23,049 locations are unserved and 3,927 locations are underserved — meaning they fail to meet FCC minimum broadband speed standards.

Hess combined data from the U.S. census and a 2022 United Way ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained, Employed) report to conclude that 46 percent of Indiana County was facing financial hardship, suggesting that $80 to $200 monthly Internet bills “create a choice between Internet service and other basic needs.”

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) says that it has placed Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grant money on hold to address continued claims that the program has been unfairly tilted to the direct benefit of billionaire Elon Musk.

In July, the office faced widespread accusations that Trump administration changes made to the BEAD program deprioritized faster fiber technologies and gave an unfair advantage to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their slower, more congested low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite technologies.

The changes were part of the Trump administration’s misleadingly-named “benefit of the bargain” modifications, which eliminated requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable to the public, removed efforts to ensure equitable broadband delivery, and doled out billions to Musk and Bezos for satellite service they’d already planned to deploy.

An email obtained by the Texas Tribune sent from the state broadband office to subgrantees says that a hold is being placed on all BEAD disbursements “until further notice.”

“No further action is required from subgrantees at this time,” the office said in the email. “The BDO will provide additional guidance and updates as they become available.”

The email does not provide a reason for the hold, and the Texas Broadband Office did not respond to a request for comment. But the hold comes just a week after Texas Comptroller Don Huffines announced a comprehensive internal review of his office, including the state broadband office, in part to address complaints of Musk favoritism.

Indiana Cooperatives are once again at the front of the pack as the state prepares to dramatically expand affordable fiber access on the back of $483 million in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grants.

The first round of bead funding is expected to connect an estimated 123,000 Indiana households and businesses that currently have either substandard Internet access, or no access at all. All told, the state’s BEAD deployment plan is slated to expand affordable fiber access to 91 of Indiana's 92 counties.

Last June, the Decatur County Rural Electric Membership Corporation (DCREMC) was the first of the state’s 24 BEAD grant awardees to sign a contract with the Indiana Broadband Office.

The cooperative’s $7.1 million BEAD award will help extend fiber service to roughly 2,800 additional homes and businesses across the rural and sparsely populated communities across Decatur County, including Greensburg, Napoleon, Millhousen, and St. Paul. Most of the construction is expected to be finished before year’s end.

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Decatur County REMC expanded into fiber Internet access in January of 2025 under the Power Stream Fiber brand. Power Stream Fiber currently offers three tiers of service: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $65 a month; a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $80 a month; and a symmetrical 2 Gbps service option for $110 a month.

The Oregon Broadband Office (OBO) has announced the preliminary awardees selected to assume Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) projects that were voluntarily declined by their original awardees.  

As ILSR has explored, the unpopular changes and massive delays introduced by the Trump administration to the BEAD program have resulted in not only a large number of states having to retool their plans, but many original project bidders retreating from their original proposals.

In some cases, soaring U.S. costs have resulted in ISPs reconsidering their commitment to original broadband expansion plans. 

In other instances, providers have grown frustrated with additional bureaucratic hurdles affixed to BEAD deployments by the NTIA.

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According to an OBO announcement, four of the state’s original BEAD awardees declined a total of 15 projects prior to the state’s June 10 Notice of Intent to Award acceptance deadline. The projects represented 13,381 broadband serviceable locations (BSLs), approximately $122.9 million in requested grant funding, and more than $39.1 million in matching contributions.

Oregon is slated to receive $689 million in total BEAD funding to shore up Internet access to communities trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.