Mississippi BEAD director credits electric co-ops for reaching rural

The most rural parts of Mississippi are home to expansive agricultural lands with low residential density and until recent years, little incentive for broadband providers to build broadband infrastructure. Homes in the Mississippi Delta—the state’s most untenanted area—have typically used satellite service to make do, according to Sally Doty, a former state senator who was appointed as Director of the new Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi (BEAM) office in 2022. As the federal government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding nears deployment, the BEAM office is leading the charge to make broadband more affordable and accessible in Mississippi, especially those low-density areas. Through BEAM's mapping efforts Doty estimates the state has almost 1.4 million serviceable broadband locations (those capable of 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds), with about 300,000 that are completely unserved and 211,000 that are considered “underserved.” A “tremendous” amount of that work should be attributed to Electric Cooperatives of Mississippi, she said, which has been building out infrastructure through its Connect Rural Mississippi campaign. Mississippi took $75 million in CARES Act funding in 2020, and the state legislature decided to appropriate the “majority” of that money to electric co-ops.