Individuals who primarily Reside in a Rural Area

As states prepare to receive their allocations from the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, Louisiana is putting the finishing touches on its plan to put that money to work. The state’s broadband office released the first volume of its BEAD proposal, outlining Louisiana’s current efforts to deploy broadband, a breakdown of unserved and underserved locations as well as how it plans to tackle the challenge process.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau, in consultation with the Office of the Managing Director, announces the amount of unused funds for the Rural Health Care (RHC) Program that has been carried forward for funding year 2023.

About $115 million in federal funds will spread broadband internet to rural areas around New Hampshire in the coming years, improving people's lives and boosting the state's economy. "By the time we get done with these resources (in late 2026), we do expect to have a very significant portion of the unserved and underserved locations in the state up to speed and online," Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs. Caswell participated in an announcement of $50 million in federal funding to the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative.

The most rural parts of Mississippi are home to expansive agricultural lands with low residential density and until recent years, little incentive for broadband providers to build broadband infrastructure. Homes in the Mississippi Delta—the state’s most untenanted area—have typically used satellite service to make do, according to Sally Doty, a former state senator who was appointed as Director of the new Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi (BEAM) office in 2022. As the federal government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding nears deployment, the BEAM of

Some counties have a bigger cellular coverage problem than they do a broadband problem. There are often a much larger number of homes in a county that don’t have adequate cellular coverage than those that can’t buy broadband. I always knew that the cellular coverage maps published by the big cellular carriers were overstated; now I know that they are pure garbage. Before the pandemic, the Federal Communications Commission came up with a plan to spend $9 billion from the Universal Service Fund to build and equip new rural cellular towers—using a reverse auction method.

The Federal Communications Commission temporarily waives, on its own motion, the application of the budget control mechanism for rate-of-return carriers that receive high-cost universal service support

This plan outlines Louisiana’s first coordinated effort to assess the state’s digital divide and move Louisiana toward digital equity.

The state of Tennessee is expected by some estimates to receive as much as $896 million through the federal government's $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Peter Welch (D-VT) and Representative Becca Balint (D-VT) announced that NEK Community Broadband (NEKCB) will receive Vermont’s first-ever United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ReConnect grant to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises network in Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties in Vermont.

Charter has received funding to cover some of the costs of deploying broadband to 260,000 more rural locations from state and “other” sources, said Charter CEO Chris Winfrey. And there likely will be more to come. “Our BEAD chances are very good,” said Winfrey, in a reference to the upcoming $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The company was one the largest winners in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, which awarded funding for an area to the company that committed to deploying service for the lowest level of government support.