Senate BEAD Oversight and Reliable Broadband Service

On November 22, seven Republican US senators led by Sen Steve Daines (R-MT) wrote to National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) head Alan Davidson about the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program: "Unfortunately, in your recent BEAD Notice of Opportunity Funding (NOFO), NTIA excluded broadband service using entirely unlicensed spectrum from its definition of reliable broadband, a stark contrast to Congress’s tech-neutral intent and previous determinations reached by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)." On December 20, Administrator Davidson replied saying that BEAD contains provisions specifically designed to address concerns about overbuilding:

• First, as required by the statute, the NOFO defines unserved locations as “those without any broadband service at all or with broadband service offering speeds below 25 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream/3 Mbps upstream,” and underserved locations as “those without broadband service offering speeds of 100 Mbps downstream/20 Mbps upstream.”
• Second, the NOFO includes a specific provision to prevent overbuilding due to potentially duplicative federal funding commitment.
• Further, the ACCESS BROADBAND Act established the Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth (OICG) within NTIA and directed OICG to, among other things, “track the construction and use of and access to any broadband infrastructure built using any Federal support in a central database.” NTIA is coordinating closely with the FCC, Treasury, USDA, and others to fully implement NTIA’s statutory coordination duties under the ACCESS BROADBAND Act and to ensure that states, tribes, and communities have the information they need for planning and coordination purposes