Soon, Google will have changed how it displays certain search results. Microsoft will no longer have Windows customers use its Bing internet search tool by default. And Apple will give iPhone and iPad users access to rival app stores and payment systems for the first time. The tech giants have been preparing ahead of a March 6 deadline to comply with a new European Union law intended to increase competition in the digital economy.
From an internet service provider perspective, the BEAD grant program has progressed at a glacial scale. The BEAD grants were signed into law on November 15, 2021, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Folks in the industry assumed that BEAD would follow a timeline similar to the earlier grants that were awarded using federal CARES and ARPA funding, and vendors certainly thought that grant awards would start in 2023 with construction underway by 2024. And then nothing happened. The BEAD process got bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy.
The thinking behind the $42.5 billion BEAD rural funding program was that individual states were better positioned than the federal government to understand their local needs and tailor state-level rules accordingly, and we are seeing a lot of variation from state to state. A case in point: Two Midwestern states—Minnesota and Missouri—have mapped out two somewhat different paths for administering the BEAD program.
Visionary Broadband—a provider of high-speed internet service to communities in the rural West including Colorado, Wyoming and Montana—announced the acquisition of Aristata Communications. Aristata CEO Carlin Walsh said the acquisition will provide Aristata access to capital to upgrade aging and outdated infrastructure in order to provide its current and future customers with reliable high-speed internet they need and deserve. Aristata has long used Visionary’s dual-routed network to reach the internet and observed Visionary’s technical and operational abilities during that time.
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