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The three-year anniversary of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is fast approaching. Zero households have been connected through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, IIJA’s signature $42.5B broadband program that aims to bring universal internet service to all Americans. While all infrastructure programs take years to implement, BEAD’s pace has led to increased congressional scrutiny of the program. Whether or not the BEAD program is off track is a point of contention amongst stakeholders.

Much has been written about 2024 being the “year of execution” for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment. This has led many to believe that 2024 will see BEAD dollars put to work to connect homes that lack broadband access.

I met my husband Dan ten years ago, approximately 18 months after he got back from Afghanistan, and about five weeks after he left active duty. It was, in his words, as he was “shakily beginning the transition into civilian life.” That’s when I began learning about the role the internet plays in the lives of Veterans. Over the last decade, I’ve watched Dan navigate the hard journey of building a new identity as a civilian and Veteran. For Dan, the internet was arguably the most valuable and essential tool he had in redefining “esprit de corps” when he left active duty.

Now is time for the Federal Communications Commission to restructure its fixed broadband definitions so that they better reflect consumer demand and market realities and are more resilient to the accelerating pace of technological change. In addition, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development (Broadband Commission) should lead an effort to develop globally-harmonized and future-proof broadband definitions, that do not continually relegate people in some countries to second class connectivity.

We have a connection problem. Statistics from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) show that around 18 million people in the U.S. do not have high-speed broadband options from any provider, but those numbers are based on metrics that policymakers widely agree need fixing.

[Commentary] Recently, DigitalC launched the Connect the Unconnected program. Here I offer details on the technical design, the solution architecture, and our hopes for America's first, dedicated gigabit network designed specifically to support the unserved and underserved members of our community. The Connect the Unconnected network aspires to connect the 50% of Cleveland residents with no wired broadband access. Designing and launching a reference architecture for a dedicated high speed broadband network and all the attendant wrap around services and support is my definition of civic technology. Connect the Unconnected is about making a small contribution to a simple idea. When history is written, our ability to extend access to the digital economy and all of its opportunities is the surest way to bet on a future of prosperity for all of us. Connecting the Unconnected is the promise of supporting those unserved and underserved to restart their dreams and hopes for a better tomorrow.

[Gonickis is Chief Executive of DigitalC, a civic tech collaboration that partners with the community to design technology-driven programs and services]

[Commentary] My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement. If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do:

Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works.
Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale.
Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address.
Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write.
Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used.

[Walter Isaacson is the CEO of the Aspen Institute]

[Commentary] Now that we have a “Listen Before Talk” (“LBT”) protocol for LAA/eLAA and a “Coexistence Test Plan” for LTE-U all the threats to Wi-Fi have been eliminated, right? Wrong. At least two big problems remain. First, LBT addresses channel access, but it does not fully address channel occupancy issues. Second, the coexistence test plan will be of little value without a baseline data set documenting the performance of modern Wi-Fi in the wild prior to any LTE-U or LAA deployment.

I know that unlicensed spectrum is supposed to be the “Wild West” – the land of permission-less innovation. And, if all that was at stake with Wi-Fi was the opportunity to do email at the airport or to surf the Web in your home, it might make sense for the government to keep hands off. But, the inconvenient truth is that Wi-Fi has become the essential communications foundation of modern society. The national electric power grid, nuclear power plants, hospitals, and almost every institution and piece of infrastructure in our Nation relies on Wi-Fi. Was it a mistake to let this happen? Probably. But can we simply pretend that it didn’t happen? No. What follows below is a more detailed explanation of why LBT and the Coexistence Test Plan alone are not sufficient to protect our Nation’s critical reliance on Wi-Fi.

[Joey Padden is a wireless technologist who previously worked at Layer3 TV]