New Mexico, Minnesota latest to say BEAD funds won't be enough

Officials from New Mexico and Minnesota are the latest to declare that federal and state funds currently available to them will not be enough to bring broadband to the underserved and unserved in their states. Bree Maki, the executive director of Minnesota’s Office of Broadband Development, said the state’s Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) allotment of about $651.8 million is “very close to” what her office expected. “However, we have statutory goals that are different when we talk about what unserved is,” said Maki. The state of Minnesota considers unserved locations to be those without access to 100/20 Mbps speeds. New Mexico received an allocation of $675.3 million. Ovidiu Viorica, the broadband and technology manager for Connect New Mexico, said that while that is “a lot of money, the preliminary estimates indicate that it’s not going to be enough to get the job done in New Mexico, regardless of the type of technology that that we're looking at.” “We have a significant gap. A big missing piece is the middle mile on the infrastructure side,” Viorica noted. And because BEAD funding won’t be enough to complete infrastructure in New Mexico, it won’t reach into “the digital equity side, the affordability, which leads to adoption.”