Doug Dawson

We’ve had a quiet policy change lately, and satellite broadband is starting to be considered broadband by the federal government, and from a policy perspective, it is a big deal. The biggest change came with the recent Notice from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that reshuffled Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grant rules and put satellite on an equal footing with fiber, fixed wireless, and other broadband technologies.

The Computer & Communication Industry Association released a paper recently warning about the impact of imposing Universal Service Fund fees on what it characterizes as cloud services. CCIA is an association that lobbies on behalf of some of the largest web companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Cloudflare.

It’s clear that the new National Telecommunications and Information Administration guidelines for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program will both significantly pare down the overall outlay from the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program and also will reduce the amount of the grant funding that will be used for fiber construction. Any shift away from fiber will have a definite impact on fiber cable vendors like Corning, CommScope, Lightera, and Prysmian. Fiber vendors love rural projects like BEAD since low population density means a lot of miles of fiber are needed.

I was once lucky enough to have interviewed a number of rural people who told me what it was like when they finally got electricity. Almost every person I talked to mentioned how life-changing it was to brightly illuminate their homes with electric lightbulbs. Rural electricity was largely funded by low-income loans to newly formed electric cooperatives.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s recent Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program Notice changed the BEAD grant process to focus almost entirely on awarding the grant funds to the internet service provider that asks for the least amount of funding for a given location. But there are some other interesting changes in the Notice for ISPs to consider. 

The biggest impact of changing the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program is on the public living in the rural areas that are covered by BEAD. Let me start with BEAD eligibility. The new rules include a provision that wireless internet service providers that claim speeds to the Federal Communications Commission of 100/20 Mbps using unlicensed spectrum can certify their capability to State Broadband Offices and have those areas removed from BEAD eligibility.

I’ve been saying for the last few years that the hardest job in the industry has been the folks who head State Broadband Offices. A lot of the hard work these folks did over the last three years was erased when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) first eliminated the Digital Equity grants and then recently eviscerated the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants. What is probably the most disturbing about the sudden change in the rules is that BEAD was finally working.

County officials understand better than anybody that better broadband is economic development. They understand that fiber means people will have enough upload speeds to work from home and how higher-paying jobs uplift a local economy. They were looking at the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program as a tool that would bolster the future of their County. The most disheartening thing about the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Notice is seeing all of the effort local folks have made to get better broadband fall by the wayside.

When the National Telecommunications and Information Administration made it clear that it was going to change the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program rules, I wrote a piece that I called, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the BEAD Bingo Card. It listed a range of options for how NTIA might modify BEAD—from canceling the program to leaving it largely intact. On June 6, NTIA issued a BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice that defines how BEAD is going to work.

In a precursor to the headlines we’ll be seeing in the U.S., Telefónica announced on May 27 that it shut off its copper telephone network in Spain. The company was able to decommission the first two of its 8,500 exchanges in 2014, and the pace has accelerated since then, with 4,300 exchanges shut in 2024. Telefónica claims to be the first telephone company in Europe to have completed the transition from copper to fiber.