Bandwidth Hawk

The White House seems bent on getting legislation through Congress to gut the BEAD Program’s original intent.

So near and yet so far. We’re now dangerously close to destroying any chance of reaching the potential that the BEAD Program once offered – while still spending the $42.5 billion budgeted for it.

By: Steven S. Ross, Broadband Communities

Over the past year — as I and others have been sounding the alarm — major carriers, Elon Musk’s Starlink, and various “impartial” nonprofit self-styled think tanks have worked their magic against the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program in their time-tested ways.

Friends of the BEAD Program have not been entirely helpful, pushing hard against massive political headwinds in a doomed attempt to protect low-income customers, contractor and ownership diversity, and network capacity, reliability, and flexibility.

The White House, meanwhile, seems bent on getting legislation through Congress to gut the BEAD Program’s original intent, even before a hearing is held to confirm Arielle Roth’s appointment to run the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) as BEAD’s chief officer.

Roth is known to be upset about fiber’s “preference” in BEAD, but she’s also known to be sensible and honest.

Thus, the chosen White House vehicle to gut BEAD is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a known enemy of BEAD or anything else that seems pro-consumer.

But, Lutnick has been comically out of the loop.

He was on Fox News, for instance, insisting that Canadian auto tariffs were going into immediate effect. Lutnick’s comments came as the White House announced a monthlong delay.

We seem to have only a few weeks to salvage anything valuable from this mess.

So how did we get here, what are the lies, where is the stupidity – and what is the solution?

Hint: On this, as in so many things, mainstream media and traditional party politics are worse than clueless. No solution there.

In the beginning

BEAD was conceived in 2021 after COVID had made us painfully aware that remote work and remote education are rather hard to do without reliable, high-capacity broadband. Expanding the nation’s broadband infrastructure to all but a few would make the country more resilient, not just against disease but also against increasingly common extreme weather events. It would improve economic prospects for, in particular, remote areas and low-income areas that had been bypassed by most commercial carriers.

The cost seemed high but so were (and are) the promised benefits.

Remote medical care alone could save enough money and lives to pay the price. Slowing or stopping the population drain from rural areas (which strains existing infrastructure and forces construction of new roads, schools and housing in urban areas), as I have been documenting since 2014, could also cover the cost.

BEAD’s startup has been slow but on schedule

The first barrier to overcome was the matter of the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband deployment map. It wasn’t just inaccurate, it was worthless. The price tag for a new map, done right, was $65 million, at a minimum.

But Congress delayed funding for years as it was caught up in government shutdowns and threats of shutdowns. Despite that, the new map was completed, and it was in good enough shape that BEAD met every significant statutory deadline since its 2021 passage.

Many members of Congress would tell you otherwise. They lie.

Now that state grants have begun to be issued, and state broadband offices are well-enough along with their deployment plans, the White House and many members of Congress say the whole process would be sped up if we just ripped up the rules and started over. Huh?

And what about those nonprofits who spend the big carriers’ money? Well, they have published studies showing that only big carriers can be trusted to build the networks they never wanted to build with their own money in the first place.

Fixes are needed!

All that said, a lot has happened since 2021:

• Supply constraints and deployment labor costs for BEAD’s preferred deployment method, fiber-optic cable, have increased.
• The ecosystem of consultants, a la carte content providers, remote network management firms, maintenance contractors, and other support work has continued to evolve, allowing much smaller-scale operators to compete and thrive. Even a fair-size multiple-dwelling unit (MDU) building can now be its own network provider.
• Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology has gotten better, but also more expensive.
• Floods, fires and tornado events have gotten measurably more violent and more frequent, thanks to climate change, exactly as climate models predicted. Half of Congress believes none of that. The other half seems to support strong, cumbersome permitting for deployment of fiber on public lands. Compromise, folks.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) has spawned the need for small, distributed, cloud data centers that actively calculate and interact with data, not just store it. Those centers need fiber connections and power supplies. Really, only fiber will do. Some in Congress see an opening for nuclear power to run them. I’m a physicist. Doesn’t scare me. But really, is nuclear cost-effective against wind, solar, or methane from fuel extraction sites?
• Little new spectrum is still available for civilian use and the military has been loath to sell what it has.
• Spectrum ownership is a barrier, but the technical needs of cellular, fixed wireless, and satellite have converged somewhat. As new spectrum is becoming rare, the spectrum we have will increasingly be accessed for use and reuse by microcells and short-distance point-to-point. Obviously, all this has to connect to fiber.

Final thoughts

I talked to a half-dozen state BEAD offices in early March. They all said they’d like a bit more flexibility, but any major rewrite of BEAD would just add to the deployment timetable – it would typically mean reopening state rulemaking.

Over the past few months, on an informal basis, state offices I’ve talked to seem to think Starlink is too expensive – it might deploy faster, but not at a particularly good price point. Some suggest that Starlink’s business model – direct sales to individuals or real estate customers – could benefit from a wider range of sellers, particularly with agricultural and small-retail expertise, but also with condo associations and industrial gear providers. I heard no worry about any Starlink monopoly among the state offices I talked to.

They all beg the FCC and the Pentagon to get more spectrum on the table. They all note that the time to complain is fast disappearing.

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