BEAD is 'unlikely' to bring broadband that will last

Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program money may be enough to connect most folks to 100/20 Mbps, but those speeds likely won’t cut it by the end of the decade, said Connect Humanity’s Brian Vo. We’ve heard from the White House that the BEAD Program will help connect everyone in the country to reliable and affordable high-speed internet by 2030. The task is nothing if not ambitious, but the big question is whether the allotted $42.5 billion can get us there. The overall capital required to provide gigabit fiber-to-the-home to every citizen falls somewhere between $120-$200 billion, said Vo. “BEAD, if you include the capital match of 25% [that] gets you in the $50 to $60 billion range, so there’s already a capital gap there,” he said. If $60 billion is enough, the assumption is that the goal is to provide speeds of 100/20 Mbps and that this target is “sufficient.” Bandwidth consumption, however, has been on the rise for the last 15 years, and is unlikely to go down.