States are poised to receive $42.5 billion in new Broadband, Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD) subsidies in the new year thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. But a growing number of ISPs in states like Minnesota say they may not participate in this latest round of federal grants, citing bureaucracy and burdensome restrictions.

While American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grants came with significant leeway as to how grant money could be spent, BEAD grants, overseen by the National Telecommunications And Information Administration (NTIA), come with numerous requirements related to lien mandates, low-cost service obligations, and deployment technology.

Those restrictions serve a purpose in the wake of the boondoggle that was the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which resulted in a massive number of defaulting bids and unfinished projects because companies bidding on projects lacked the competency or financing to finish their awarded projects. It’s a major reason the NTIA was put in charge of BEAD.

But many Minnesota ISPs are still bristling at BEAD’s requirements, according to Brent Christensen, president and CEO of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance, an organization that represents 70 ISPs across the North Star State.

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“My members are telling me they’re not going to participate,” Christensen recently told MinnPost when asked about the $42.45 billion broadband program. “The way that BEAD is structured. I don’t know how anybody’s going to participate.”

North Carolina’s Roanoke Cooperative continues to make steady progress with expansion of its Fybe last mile fiber network within The Tar Heel State.

Cooperative officials tell ILSR that the cooperative and a coalition of organizations across North Carolina have major expansion plans in the works, starting with a fiber build in Halifax County, population 47,298.

Currently, Fybe provides fiber broadband service to around 6,000 subscribers in North Carolina, but thanks to an historic infusion of federal and state grants, the hope is to expand fiber access to the bulk of unserved addresses county-wide.

Fybe COO Bo Coughlin tells ILSR that the lion’s share of the cooperative's upcoming efforts to bring affordable connectivity to unserved and under-served portions of North Carolina will be under the banner of a coalition dubbed Encore, a nonprofit collaboration between MCNC, North Carolina Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMC), and Fybe.

“MCNC has been around for 40 years,” Coughlin notes. “It started as an economic Development institution funded by the state. Their goal was originally to help birth the microchip industry in RTP down in Raleigh, but today they provide transport to around a hundred universities, charter schools, and community anchor institutions across nearly 100 counties.”

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Back in April, Fybe won a $9 million Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grant to help bring fiber to the largely underserved, heavily-rural residents of Martin, Bertie, Halifax, and Hertford counties.

“So currently, we pass about 5,000 total homes across Northampton and Halifax,” Coughlin said of Fybe’s current footprint.

States wary about the restrictions and delays with looming federal broadband grants are poised to put significant taxpayer resources into Starlink and other low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. The problem: such services often aren’t affordable, raise environmental questions, and may struggle to keep pace with consumer capacity demand.

Back in March, Maine unveiled a $5.4 million initiative to offer Starlink Low Earth Orbit (LEO) terminals to 9,000 state residents outside the reach of broadband from existing terrestrial providers.

An estimated 9,000 locations in the state (1.5 percent of residents) have no access to broadband, mostly peppered across rural Oxford, Penobscot, and Aroostook counties.

While well intentioned, the state’s initiative immediately sparked a debate about whether Starlink is the best use of taxpayer resources.

Starlink May Be Part of Solution

LEO satellite broadband has understandable allure for state broadband offices tasked with showing the federal government they have a solution for every premise – household and business – in the state. Depending on geography and state, some of these locations may require $100,000 for a terrestrial wireline connection.

Many of these unserved locations may be inhabited for a few weeks a year by the family of billionaires or 52 weeks a year by a family barely able to afford the fuel to live there. Spending $100,000 on that household may mean tens of other households see no improvement or have to settle for worse technology. And depending on who you ask, NTIA either demands that the state actually connect that household or simply have a feasible plan to achieve that connection.

In the wake of the election, and with potential major changes ahead for the national "Internet For All" effort, many in the broadband world are wondering: where do we go from here?

That's what the next Building For Digital Equity (#B4DE) livestream event seeks to answer, inviting you to wear your ugly sweater, join the free virtual gathering, and dive into what a post-Biden administration broadband world may look like.

Slated for December 16, 2024 from 3 to 4:15 PM ET, the "Reflect, Recharge, Reach Forward" themed livestream promises to offer penetrating insights and practical ideas on the way forward.

Registration is now open here.

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Co-hosted by Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks Initiative and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), the popular (and free) online event will feature two prominent figures in this space: NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer and New Street Research Policy Advisor Blair Levin.

New York’s Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP) continues to provide grant funds to build municipal broadband networks across the state, as state broadband officials recently announced the program’s largest round of funding to date.

As we reported in June, the MIP program – specifically designed to fund municipally-owned networks as part of the Empire State’s $1 billion ConnectALL initiative – awarded $70 million to a half dozen projects earlier this summer.

Then, earlier this month, another $140 million in grant awards were announced for an additional six projects, promising to deliver “more than 1,200 miles of publicly-owned fiber optic infrastructure and wireless hubs, connecting (passing) over 60,000 homes and businesses with affordable, symmetric service – offering equal download and upload speeds at rates below regional averages.”

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The funding will be used to expand broadband infrastructure (and seed competition) in the Central New York, Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley, North Country, Mid-Hudson and Western New York regions.

In a prepared press statement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul characterized the grants as “a transformative step forward in our mission to connect every New Yorker to affordable, high-speed Internet.”

The Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas say they recently finished delivering fiber broadband capability to more than one million Arkansans as part of a $4.66 billion expansion.

More than 40,000 miles of fiber have been installed by 17 cooperative broadband providers, including 15 local broadband providers, one wholesale broadband provider, and one middle-mile fiber company.

In a prepared statement, Arkansas cooperatives indicate they have $2.2 billion in additional projects lined up connecting an additional 13,000 residents in the “Natural State.” Once completed, Arkansas cooperatives will have deployed 53,000 miles of fiber and connected 1.2 million state residents to fiber.

Informed by their efforts at rural electrification nearly a century earlier, U.S. electrical cooperatives have increasingly been pushing into fiber broadband deployment. Initially as a way to better monitor and manage complex modern electrical grids, then ultimately as a way to extend access to predominately rural customers trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Nearly 80 percent of the state cooperatives’ investment in fiber infrastructure has been self-funded without grant subsidies, the coalition notes. Many of the markets they’ve targeted have long been neglected by regional cable and phone giants that believe the investment into rural counties isn’t worth the time and resources, or won’t be profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street.  

Now that the election has been settled, many in the broadband space are wondering what, if anything, will change with the incoming Trump administration.

Of course no one has a crystal ball, but there are a number of telecommunication policy developments we will be tracking, which include numerous fronts where there will likely be changes.

What those changes will be exactly will only become apparent sometime next year.

BEAD and DEA

The BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) program and Digital Equity Act (DEA) programs are at the center of the universe in the national effort to ensure everyone has high-speed access to the Internet.

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However, in the run-up to the election, GOP leaders were highly critical of the BEAD program, saying it was taking too long to dispense funds to build new networks, questioned the NTIA favoring the building of fiber networks, and criticized aspects of the effort they consider to be a waste of taxpayer dollars.