“No money’s been spent yet. And no locations have been covered yet,” Butch Brock, chief strategy officer of Dragonfly Internet, said during a panel at the Broadband Nation Expo conference in Orlando, Fla., this week.
“We’ve got great plans, and grand plans to do it,” Brock said, referring to projects that are part of the $42 billion federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD) to help build out high-speed Internet in unserved areas. The program is part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a signature piece of domestic policy legislation from the Biden administration.
BEAD has hit several roadblocks as the administration changed in Washington. Its rollout paused while the second Trump administration issued new guidance around technology and equity.
The program’s preference for fiber was pushed aside, to allow for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service providers like Starlink. Officials believe LEO can be deployed at a cheaper cost in hard-to-reach rural areas. Its service, however, can suffer in areas with thick tree canopies.
BEAD originally allocated some $3 billion for equity and inclusion aimed at growing the necessary skills to fully access the Internet in areas like telehealth, workforce development and education. The Trump administration pared back these initiatives under its wide-reaching campaign to remove “diversity, equity and inclusion” from federal workplaces and programs.
“We’re four years in, and zero people have actually gotten benefit out of this program,” Matt Larson, CEO of Vistabeam, a regional broadband provider in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming, said during the panel. “It is crazy to think about the amount of time and effort that people have spent applying for this.”
Some of the changes to BEAD, like the shifting priority for lower costs rather than higher quality, are an unfortunate development, said Catherine Krantz, area director for broadband at Communities Unlimited, a nonprofit community development organization serving seven Southern states.
“I am fine with satellite as a temporary solution. I am fine with satellite as a last resort. I am not fine with satellite just because it’s too expensive to do something better,” Krantz said during the panel Wednesday. Low Earth orbit satellite technology, she said, may not be suitable for use cases like telehealth, precision agriculture or economic development.
“BEAD was the first program, ever, to set as its goal, universal access. And BEAD 2.0, I think, threw that away. And that’s unfortunate,” Krantz said. “It is expensive to bring world-class infrastructure to America. But it is worth it.”
To make certain projects qualify for BEAD funding, Dragonfly removed some of the locations that would be the most expensive to serve from its application, Brock said.
“That’s what we had to do to make the application work,” he said. “My frustration is it [BEAD] went from the biggest bipartisan of issues … and it became partisan just like that.”
Industry and other officials called attention to BEAD’s diminished focus on digital equity and inclusion. Often, when policymakers and officials view digital equity funding, they do not always realize “the type of programs that that was going to support. And it’s so unfortunate,” Heather Gate, executive vice president of digital inclusion at Connected Nation, said. “Because they weren’t even just about computer skills. They were about workforce development. They were about things that were making significant investments in the future.”
The new BEAD guidance also loosened requirements around providing low-cost Internet service. Grantees must still comply with the requirement to provide at least one low-cost plan, but states are prohibited from setting the rate. The White House this week issued a draft executive order which would prohibit states with “onerous” AI laws from being eligible for non-deployment BEAD funds. (The draft order was previously reported by the AI news site Transformer.)
The slow rollout of broadband infrastructure projects has tested the patience of the mostly rural residents and businesses who stand to benefit from the infrastructure expansion, Krantz said.
“People are back to being angry again,” she said. "They’re not feeling that positive anymore. It’s back to pitchforks. I’m seeing that in community meetings. People that still don’t have Internet are pretty unhappy about it.”
