Members of Congress appear to be tired of waiting for progress on the BEAD program, especially the lack of guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on $21 billion in remaining funds designated for non-
deployment use.
Impact: A recent House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology hearing featured NTIA chief administrator Arielle Roth, who was quizzed about the direction of BEAD, guidance around the non-deployment funds, concerns about provider decision to decline awards, still-unapproved BEAD plans (California and Illinois, we’re looking at you), and general implementation of the program. The program’s deployments remain almost sloth-like in their speed despite the administration’s determination more than a year ago that stripping BEAD’s fiber preference and other program guidance it didn’t like would result in faster deployments. While Democratic members of the subcommittee continued to criticize the changes made to BEAD amid concerns that their constituents would end up with “inferior” service, some Republican members also expressed frustration about the program’s progress and the lack of meaningful deployments.
The first question Roth fielded came from Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), who chairs the subcommittee and asked when states should expect details on the non-deployment guidance, which has already been delayed by several months. Roth said NTIA will release guidance on the non-deployment funds at some point this summer but was vague about the exact timing. Nor did she fully commit to distributing the entirety of the remaining funds to the states and territories as they were originally awarded when fielding a question on that from a different member. Instead, she said, “We’re proceeding with the assumption that every state will be able to get access to their remaining funds.” That’s not exactly a full-throated commitment that every state will receive the entirety of the funding they were promised. She later clarified that the delay isn’t related to any effort from NTIA to pull back some of the funding.
Roth addressed other member concerns as well, noting that in states where providers have declined their BEAD awards, officials have moved quickly to backfill those locations by finding providers willing to take on those areas. She also noted that the areas where providers have refused their awards make up only 1% of total BEAD locations, hinting that the declines aren’t a huge threat to the overall success of BEAD… yet. That could still change if award declines start to accelerate. The declines have come from a variety of states and providers, including Amazon Leo in Nebraska and Texas, Astound in Oregon and Texas, and Resound Networks (which reportedly has declined the most awards so far) in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas. All-in-all, roughly a dozen states have seen provider declines. The reasoning behind the declines isn’t fully apparent yet, but an Astound executive told Telecompetitor that the company didn’t win all the projects it bid on and the areas where it did win weren’t near its existing footprint, which raised deployment costs. Supply chain issues also appear to have played a role in some of the refusals. And some electric cooperatives have declined awards and exited the program over concerns about potential FCC pole attachment rule changes.
On a more positive note, Roth revealed that two states – Louisiana and Nebraska – have broken ground on BEAD projects and started connecting people to high-speed broadband using funding from the program. But that news comes nearly five years after BEAD became law, and the projects currently underway in both states involve fixed wireless rather than fiber to connect customers to high-speed service, which didn’t impress committee members. Five other states also are reportedly ready to connect customers using BEAD awards that went to satellite Internet providers, but committee members still had concerns about why deployments were taking so long and again questioned the removal of the program’s fiber preference in favor of slower satellite Internet.
