The U.S.’s $42.5 Billion High-Speed Internet Plan Hits a Snag: A Worker Shortage

The federal government is missing a crucial link in its plan to greatly expand access to high-speed internet service in rural America: enough workers to get the job done. Fiber splicers—the workers who install, maintain and repair wired broadband networks—are in short supply. “We’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off,” says Jason Jolly, chief executive of Fiberscope LLC, a Sullivan (MO)-based company that does contracted fiber-splicing work. Jolly says his five-person crew has been “getting nonstop calls for the last two months.” And that’s before the money starts flowing from the government’s $42.5 billion broadband spending package. The industry is bracing for that spending to start flooding the market as soon as 2023. The result could be a worsening of the delays and cost inflation that already are plaguing wired-internet providers’ network-expansion projects, industry analysts and executives say. That raises questions about whether the new federal spending will be enough to end the so-called digital divide by the Biden administration’s target of 2030, or even at all.