Future-Proofing Federal Broadband Grants

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There has been a lot of discussion in the last few months about how wonderful it was for Congress to have increased the speed requirements for broadband grant eligibility to 100/20 Mbps in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants. If we accept that 25/3 Mbps was a good definition for download speed in 2015 and that 100/20 Mbps is a good definition in 2022, then that is an acknowledgment that the demand for download broadband speed has grown at about 21 percent per year. This raises an interesting question of how good it is for a grant program today to use a 100 Mbps definition for broadband? The main reason that this is a relevant question is that the BEAD grants aren’t going to be constructed for many years. My best guess is that the majority of BEAD grants will be awarded in 2024, and internet service providers will have four more years to finish network construction – until 2028. The above table shows how much broadband demand for download speed grew from 2015 until 2022. What might this look like by the time the BEAD networks are fully implemented? If we really wanted to future-proof the BEAD grants, then technology that won’t be built until 2028 should be required to deliver at least 300 Mbps download. Anything less than that means networks that the public will feel are inadequate as they are being deployed.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]


Future-proofing Grants