Can Vermont Turn Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Into High-Speed Internet for All?

The Vermont Community Broadband Board announced that the state will receive $229 million in federal funding from a White House initiative to expand high-speed broadband access. That figure is some $50 million more than state officials had anticipated — good news for the effort to wire up rural Vermont. In the lead-up to the announcement, officials worried that Vermont would get too small a piece of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program pie. The federal government doled out the money based on an internet connectivity map generated by the Federal Communications Commission, which overstated the number of Vermont households with reliable broadband connection. That led the Vermont Community Broadband Board to launch a campaign urging residents to look up their home on the federal commission's website, which tracked high-speed connections house-by-house and had a mechanism for challenging the findings. On June 26, 2023, state officials learned that Vermonters had won almost 11,000 challenges, each worth $3,000 to $5,000 in additional aid. Still, success is not assured. In a March 2023 report, State Auditor Doug Hoffer and his team raised concerns about how the effort could be tripped up. For one: Vermont is relying on communications union districts, new entities with no experience handling large expenses, to turn hundreds of millions of once-in-a-lifetime federal dollars into a web of high-speed internet connectivity. Now it's a question of whether they can pull it off. For rural Vermonters bypassed by for-profit internet service providers, it's a matter of equity. A lack of broadband has left them without easy access to telemedicine, remote job opportunities and virtual schooling.