Fifty States – Fifty Different BEAD Grants

When the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) suggested Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant rules, a lot of industry folks assumed that states would largely follow the NTIA suggestions and that there would be a lot of similarity in the BEAD grant rules between states. It turns out that the opposite is happening, and many State Broadband Offices are taking unique approaches. In this article, I compare the BEAD grant rules for Georgia and Illinois. A high-level comparison of the two shows that the states differ on their overall approaches and important scoring metrics, including the points given for broadband rates and local support. If I didn’t know both were BEAD grants, I would never guess the states were using the same funding source. The scoring emphasizes drastically different priorities. Overall, these two plan demonstrate the wide variance of state philosophies behind BEAD.