States, NTIA say municipal broadband laws won’t delay BEAD funding

State and federal government officials said that state laws restricting municipal broadband deployments aren’t expected to delay the distribution of funding from the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. BEAD support is expected to be divvied up among all 50 states in the coming months, but, as BroadbandNow noted, rules for BEAD stipulate that states with laws that either restrict or prohibit municipal broadband must disclose whether or not they plan to waive such laws. BroadbandNow argued that in theory, nothing would prevent the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from withholding money from states that decline to dispense with these laws. An NTIA representative said, "There is nothing in our rules that any state’s or territory’s BEAD allocation would be delayed or reduced due to a state’s restriction on pre-existing public eligibility to compete for BEAD grants."