Washington Bill Tests Limits of State BEAD Authority

Service providers in the state of Washington are concerned about legislation pending in the state’s House of Representatives. Included in the 425-page budget bill is wording that would only allow funding from the federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program to be used to build open-access networks. “Our member companies, even those with open access networks, don’t support that mandate,” said David Ducharme, director of the Broadband Communications Association of Washington (BCAW). According to the budget bill that passed through committee in the Washington House, state broadband offices “may only award federal or other state funding to a project that will result in the construction or improvement of open-access broadband infrastructure that remains open access for the useful life of the subsidized project." The bill goes on to define open access as meaning an arrangement in which the network owner “offers nondiscriminatory access to and use of its network on a wholesale basis to other providers seeking to provide broadband service to end-user locations, at rates that include a discount from the provider’s retail rates reflecting the costs that the subgrantee avoids by not providing retail service to the end user location.” BCAW members include some of the nation’s largest cable companies, and, according to Ducharme, those companies won’t pursue funding for deployments in unserved areas of the state if the open access requirement remains in place.