The Broadband Equity, Access & Deployment Program: $42.45 Billion for State Broadband Grants

Among the $65 billion allocated to broadband in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the Act), $42.45 billion will be used to fund a last-mile broadband development grant program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The scale of this investment is unlike anything seen before in US history. This blog entry, part of a Keller & Heckman blog series on the key broadband provisions of the Act, begins with a quick review of the basics of the Broadband Equity, Access & Deployment (BEAD) Program. We then turn to a few discrete topics that may be of particular interest at this early stage, including (1) the central role of the States, (2) the matching requirement, (3) the challenge process, and (4) the broadband DATA map.