Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program

One looming question in telecom land is what happens to President Joe Biden’s mammoth $42.45 billion internet expansion effort — known as the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program — if former President Donald Trump wins the White House in November 2024. The big-ticket broadband program is at an inflection point. While the Biden administration has signed off spending plans from most states and territories, it will be many months before any internet construction projects begin — the first groundbreaking won’t start until 2025, under the next president.

Sen John Thune (R-SD) and several of his colleagues in sent a letter to Vice President Kamala Harris regarding her "egregious mismanagement of federal broadband initiatives." In particular, the Senators criticized the delayed rollout of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, saying, "Instead of focusing on delivering broadband services to unserved areas, your administration has used the BEAD program to add partisan, extralegal requirements that were never envisioned by Congress and have obstructed broadband deployment. By imposing burdensome climate change mandates on

Organizations representing rural wireline internet providers have stated their preference for continuing to favor federal funding for fiber-based broadband construction. However, many participating in a recent National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) comment round said the agency is correct in opening the door to greater funding of alternative technologies, including unlicensed fixed wireless and low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite systems.

A common restaurant principle—“Accuracy over speed”—should guide our country’s broadband funding initiatives, particularly the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, both now and in the future. Recently, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing titled, “From Introduction to Implementation: A BEAD Program Progress Report,” and while some lines of questioning seemed to grasp at straws, there were important points that should be revisited in future hearings.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has approved Nebraska’s Initial Proposal for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris Administration’s “Internet for All” initiative. This approval enables Nebraska to request access to funding and begin implementation of the BEAD program. Nebraska was allocated over $405 million to deploy or upgrade high-speed Internet networks to ensure that everyone has access to reliable, affordable, high-speed Internet service.  

Few people dispute the vital importance of affordability in closing the digital divide.

Blair Levin, non-resident senior fellow with The Brookings Institution, has some opinions about the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. He thinks it’s being run a lot better than the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). Levin recently testified at a House subcommittee hearing where Republican Congresspeople tried to slam the BEAD program. He contrasted BEAD with the RDOF program, which set up a reverse auction to award broadband grants under the former Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program—established by Congress in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—gives priority to projects that will result in broadband internet access service being offered in areas where service wasn't available before. Given that federal funds will provide roughly 75 percent of the costs to deploy these networks,¹ the chances that competing networks will be built at any time in the foreseeable future are very slim.

A few years ago, an assessment of Alaska’s broadband needs suggested an investment of nearly $2 billion would be needed to bring high-speed connections to everyone in the nation’s largest state. The National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA) awarded Alaska just over $1 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funds.

Pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process has taken too long. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation that authorized BEAD was signed into law in November 2021. A few states are now opening a grant portal to accept BEAD grant applications—nearly three years after the legislation was passed. Not all grant programs have taken this long. An interesting contrast to BEAD is another huge-dollar federal grant program, the Capital Project Fund (CPF).