Doug Dawson

National Telecommunications and Information Administration Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth recently made a speech at the Hudson Institute that outlined her policy positions related to reshaping the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. The changes to BEAD were initiated by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and are now being finalized and implemented by Assistant Secretary Roth.

My best guess is the public switched telephone network will ether be dead or dying by the end of 2030. This doesn’t mean the death of telephone voice service, but the end of the regulated service that has been offered by telephone companies. Any voice products that remain will be delivered using Voice over Internet Protocol. The death of the PSTN is being fostered by the Federal Communications Commission, which has made it much easier for telephone companies to tear down or decommission copper telephone networks.

An article from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at the New York Law School claims that over 1 million locations were missed by Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grants. They identified these as locations that are still shown as unserved and underserved on the Federal Communications Commission broadband maps, but which did not make it into the BEAD program. ACLP also identified two other sources of locations that will likely not get broadband. They predict some BEAD defaults since a number of small and untested internet service providers won sizable BEAD grants.

I cringe every time I see the term “technology neutral”. Over the last few years, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has morphed the phrase into a euphemism to mean we should favor the cheapest technology over the best technology. And it clearly is a euphemism meant to disguise the true nature of the broadband policy discussion from those not involved in the topic every day. Governments have gotten so good at developing such phrases that the euphemisms replace the right language and become common usage.

One of the things that mystifies me is how many federal elected officials have disappeared in terms of supporting broadband. For example, there has been little talk of elected officials openly trying to stop the National Telecommunications and Information Administration from gutting the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. There’s no news about trying to force NTIA to go ahead and award grants from the Digital Equity Act. This may be happening behind the scenes, but there’s no big public news about supporting better broadband.

The case of Ligado Networks, LLC v. United States should be of interest to wireless internet service providers. Ligado Networks filed a suit that alleges that the U.S. government unlawfully took its licensed spectrum—which the company was granted by the FCC in 2020—without due compensation in favor of use by the Department of Defense. The spectrum involved in the suit is L-band spectrum, which sits next to spectrum actively used by DoD for GPS.

I recently attended a wonderful event sponsored by the Blue Ridge Broadband Alliance. The BRBA is headquartered in Asheville and is focused on improving broadband in the many rural counties in Western North Carolina. The Alliance is being led by Sara Nichols with help from two great sponsors—The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society and the Dogwood Health Trust’s Digital Opportunities Initiative.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how the Broadbnad Equity, Access, and Deployment grant program got off track. Even before the current giant swing in rules by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the program had a lot of problems. One of my observations about the BEAD grant program is that internet service providers were not an integral part of developing the grant rules. ISPs were largely ignored from the start and were only brought into the BEAD process after the rules were largely set in concrete.

What comes after Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program? While BEAD will build good broadband networks in a lot of rural communities, it’s becoming clear that BEAD is not going to solve a lot of the rural broadband gap. I start with the premise that rural communities are not going to be happy when somebody officially tells them that the federal government is giving money to Starlink or Kuiper to solve their rural broadband gap.

When Tarana released the new G2 generation of radios, one of the claims the company made was that the radios are powerful enough for internet service providers to bring point-to-multipoint broadband to metropolitan areas. The new specifications support the premise. If a wireless ISP were to install a Tarana radio on an existing tall urban tower, it should easily be able to see a lot more than 2,000 homes and businesses. It’s an interesting option that brings a real wireless option for many urban homes.