Showdown at the BEAD Corral

Rural broadband is facing a dramatic moment when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration decides what it's going to do with the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment proposals that States have presented to it. State Broadband Offices have been submitting final BEAD plans that are mostly fiber, which seems to fly in the face of the Trump administration's June 2025 changes to the program. The new BEAD guidelines issued in June made it much harder for SBOs to award money for fiber—but left a small loophole. SBOs could designate some BEAD applications as ‘priority broadband projects’, as long as they met three criteria. A proposed technology had to (1) meet the speed, latency, reliability, and consistency criteria established by the BEAD legislation, (2) be able to scale over time to meet foreseeable future broadband demand, and (3) support the deployment of 5G and other successor technologies. SBOs have seemingly aggressively used this loophole to disqualify alternative technologies and still award BEAD to fiber projects. NTIA now faces a big choice. SBOs (and the Governors they work for) have clearly said that they want BEAD money to build fiber. NTIA can now concede to the requests from States, or play the bad cop and tell States to kill most of the proposed grants for fiber.