Linda Hardesty

If you know CostQuest at all you probably think of it as the company that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hired to help the FCC clean up and refine its national broadband map. But the company is also working with state broadband offices on their Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) programs.

When will the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) money start flowing? Most states have had their Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 processes approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), according to NTIA’s Progress Dashboard. Vol. 1 is focused on the mapping challenge process, and Vol. 2 consists of the remainder of the state’s BEAD implementation plan. Yet, the wait continues.

More than a million residents in the southeastern U.S. started the week without fixed broadband and plenty more without cell phone service after Hurricane Helene brought never-before-seen levels of flooding to the valleys of Appalachia. Some operators on the extent of the damage and anticipated timelines for recovery:

Electric co-ops are uniquely positioned to apply for, and win, Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds because they already reach most of the homes in the U.S. that are currently unserved with broadband. But the question is: do co-ops even want to apply for BEAD? Cliff Johnson, head of the Rural Broadband Initiative with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) says electric co-ops are uniquely positioned to serve broadband to remote and rural customers.

There are more than 400 small fiber providers in the U.S. that are ripe for picking by investors or larger fiber companies when the "inevitable" major fiber consolidation wave occurs, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. The firm conducted a survey in August of 60 executives at different fiber companies in the telecom space. According to the survey, 93 percent of respondents said consolidation is happening or will happen soon.

Blair Levin, non-resident senior fellow with The Brookings Institution, has some opinions about the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. He thinks it’s being run a lot better than the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). Levin recently testified at a House subcommittee hearing where Republican Congresspeople tried to slam the BEAD program. He contrasted BEAD with the RDOF program, which set up a reverse auction to award broadband grants under the former Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.

Immediately after Verizon announced that it was buying Frontier Communications, people started saying “the race for fiber assets is on!”  And perhaps they are right because AT&T and BlackRock announced they want to grow their Gigapower fiber joint venture more than originally planned. AT&T also announced four new partnerships to expand its fiber network faster. AT&T said it selected each company because they provide opportunities to expand AT&T Fiber to new service areas without existing fiber options.

Brightspeed is on a big mission to deploy more fiber, currently passing about 90,000 new premises per month with fiber. But it is also retiring copper on a home-by-home basis for customers who are experiencing service problems.

In regards to the newly announced Verizon and Frontier deal, Verizon Consumer Group CEO Sowmyanarayn Sampath said, “This is exactly the kind of deal we’ve wanted to do. It goes back to the foundation of our strategy," he said. "There are two businesses we are in: premium mobility and broadband.

Even though UScellular plans to sell off big chunks of its spectrum and subscribers to T-Mobile, that's not stopping the regional wireless carrier from pursuing its fixed wireless access (FWA) ambitions—even if that means going head to head with T-Mobile in some regions. In fact, now UScellular is working with Tarana Wireless to increase its FWA capacity in West Plains, Missouri, a town where the demand for FWA is high. So high that the carrier has been getting such good uptake of its fixed wireless in West Plains that it was about to run out of capacity on its mobile network.