Making a Down Payment on Affordable, Reliable, High-Speed Internet for All

The fiber broadband industry is experiencing a historic moment. According to Joseph Wender, Director of Capital Projects Fund at the US Department of the Treasury, never before (and likely never again) have multiple government agencies provided tens of billions of dollars in funding to provide affordable, reliable, high-speed internet for all Americans and close the digital divide once and for all. The Capital Project Fund (CPF) was created before BEAD; it was one of the few COVID Relief Bills that Congress passed as part of the American Rescue Plan during the height of the pandemic and the reason why Congress specifically put $10 billion in the rescue plan. “It was a down payment on making high-speed internet affordable and reliable for all Americans,” Wender noted. The $10 billion CPF program has been critical to keeping broadband deployments progressing while larger programs, like BEAD, will take longer to disperse. Wender said that his agency wants to make investments that don’t just last years, but last decades.