Get Ready for Middle-Mile Grants

Alan Davidson, the Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), recently held a press conference and webcast talking about the $1 billion Middle-Mile Broadband Infrastructure grant program. The biggest takeaway from that conversation is that the NTIA is likely to make these awards much sooner than the awards from the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grants for last-mile broadband. Davidson was not specific about the dates of these grants, but anybody wanting to request one of these grants should start getting ready. It’s worth noting that the last-mile BEAD grants will not fund middle-mile fiber. The early NTIA rules indicate that the grants will expect any constructed fiber to have closely-spaced and regular access points. This is what distinguished last-mile fiber from middle-mile fiber. Anybody wanting the Middle-Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program grants needs to craft a good story about why a specific middle-mile grant is needed. $1 billion might sound like a lot of money, but on the national scale, it’s not a lot. This works out to an average of only $20 million per state. If you assume an average cost of middle-mile fiber at between $35,000 and $50,000, that’s only 400 – 575 miles of new fiber, on average, per state. To put this grant program into perspective, California has established a $3.5 billion middle-mile grant program just for within the state.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]