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Round-Up for the Week of May 18-22, 2026

This week, thousands of broadband industry stakeholders gathered at the Fiber Broadband Association's Fiber Connect 2026 conference in Orlando, Florida, to discuss the future of fiber broadband. The theme of this year's Fiber Connect, "Light Years Ahead," describes fiber as the conduit that "carries every part of life with it: faster learning, better health, smarter communities, [and] stronger economies." With this in mind, Fiber Connect attendees convened to discuss what lies ahead for U.S. broadband infrastructure deployment as a whole.

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Executive Director Dr. Revati Prasad sat down with FCTV Host Maggie Gaines to discuss the state of broadband deployment, the challenges the broadband industry faces, and the opportunities ahead to close the digital divide for underserved communities. The following are excerpts of Dr. Prasad's interview at Fiber Connect 2026, edited for clarity.

The Telecommunications Act is 30 years old, which is really hard to believe. You wrote an article earlier this year saying that the promise of universal access in that piece of legislation hasn't been fully realized. Where are we today, and why hasn't it been fulfilled?

That's a great level-setting question. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 really set out to connect everybody to telecommunications service. As things stand today, according to the Federal Communications Commission, we're at about 3.37 million broadband serviceable locations that do not currently have broadband. And we know that even after the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, we will still be left with about 1.3 million units that won't have broadband.

And by broadband, I mean 100 down, 20 up. That's just the size of the infrastructure issue, the fact that people don't have access to the internet. There's a second issue that, even when there is access, people aren't as connected as you would think. It's really easy to forget—if you live your life, as I think we do, in ubiquitous seamless connectivity—that 9 million households in the United States, according to the Census Bureau in 2024, don't have home internet. Unsurprisingly, a third of those households make less than $20,000 a year. 

Why is that important? Why can't we just say it's okay if you just have broadband on your phone? 

There is a very substantial difference in what you're able to do. We have a ton of research to document what you're able to do on a large-screen device versus what you're able to do on a phone. Have you ever tried to apply for a job on a phone? Ever tried to fill out a form? Ever tried to do a whole bunch of things that require much more complicated tasks? When you're not just consuming the internet, and you're not just consuming content, but rather trying to do productive things with it, you need a larger screen. And to that, actually, one in seven households doesn't have a large screen device. The numbers for that are actually worse than home connectivity. So device divides are massive in this country.  

Now there's been a lot of money thrown at this throughout the years, right? There are lots of federal programs, and the latest one you mentioned is the BEAD Program. Tell us where we are with that. That was $42.5 billion that was going to finally get us the high-speed access that everybody wants, loves, and needs. Promises were made, so where are we? Are we there yet? 

We are not quite there yet. With the change in Administration, some of the things under the BEAD Program have changed, one of them being an emphasis on the lowest cost technology, which, on the first blush, sounds fine. Yeah, let's save some taxpayer dollars and use the cheapest option there is. But the way that NTIA has about that is the cheapest option to deploy, not the cheapest option to maintain over 30 years. It's not the cheapest option for people to subscribe to, but the cheapest option to actually deploy broadband service. So, mostly that means that low Earth orbit satellites have gotten a huge chunk of the BEAD awards. The emphasis on lower cost has also meant that we're only spending about half the money. So out of the $42.5 billion, about $21 billion is unallocated right now. That funding is supposed to go to the states.

The second piece around what has changed is that BEAD came about at a time with a recognition that a lot of what had happened before with federal programs wasn't working, and part of that was that you were trying to get a federal solution to a local problem. And one of the big choices that was made with BEAD was that we're going to put states in charge. States are going to design their own programs, they're going to pick their winners, they're going to make sure that the job actually gets done, and they're going to have real teeth on how to make sure of that. And that has been really undermined in a number of ways.

For instance, the remaining funds, that $21 billion states have been told that if they have any onerous AI laws, they won't get that money. What's an onerous AI law? Nobody knows. States not being able to regulate all sorts of very potentially harmful uses of AI has nothing to do with BEAD, but now states' powers are being undercut. States also aren't being allowed to have any kind of rate requirements around BEAD or to ask providers to provide a low-cost option service for low-income customers. That's also no longer something that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is allowing states to do.

At the same time, at the federal level, we haven't had a fully seated Federal Communications Commission in a number of years, right? So...you're saying that the Trump Administration is trying to undercut that a bit and rein in the state's ability to do different things.

Yeah. It's a little bit paradoxical because at one point, the FCC—which does have a quorum, so they are technically able to do the business of the FCC— the business that they're choosing to do, we tend to have some disagreements with. But they are, on one hand, saying that we do not have the power to regulate broadband, but on the other hand, they're also trying to find avenues to dictate to states how to do it. And that's a really big problem because states actually are stepping into the breach and doing a number of things, especially around broadband affordability, to address the needs of their communities. Many states have their own broadband grant programs. They had broadband offices established before BEAD, and now they have undertaken legislation to ensure that broadband service is more affordable, especially for low-income consumers.

Let's go back to that, because we initially were talking about access. Even with access, are there still big barriers to affordability? Tell me a little bit about that. Is affordability one of the bigger issues that we see today?

Yes. Think about the fact that a third of the nine million households without internet make less than $20,000 a year. In survey after survey, research after research, you find that's the number one reason people don't subscribe to home internet. If you even account for rural areas, low-income households in rural areas aren't connected, while higher-income homes are. The divide always maps onto income and poverty.

And there were federal programs that were meant to help alleviate that. Are they working? Are they still in place?

The pandemic was a very powerful lesson in how essential this infrastructure actually is, and in the wake of that, there was the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that offered low-income subscribers $30 a month towards their broadband bill, and it had great uptake. At its peak, 24 million households subscribed to the ACP. But it expired in 2024, and Congress, although there were some talks, declined to extend it any further. What that means is that of those 24 million households, research shows that about 6 million have disconnected, and we don't really have great insight into how many of them have had to make difficult budgeting choices. A lot of them may have downgraded their service.

We actually did this qualitative interview study around people who had ACP and were going to lose it, and then eventually lost it. One of them said, "When we had it, we almost felt normal. It was only 30 bucks a month. But it relieved a little bit of pressure when the cost of living is so ridiculously high." That's been a real missed opportunity because, to go back to your first question—"What does the digital divide look like right now?"—the ACP saw a genuine addition to the number of broadband subscribers.
You saw an uptick in rural areas that brought in new people signing up for the internet because of the ACP. 

We talk a lot about rural communities and residents who are unable to get connected, or broadband is unaffordable. You mentioned the urban and suburban divide here, too. Tell us a little bit about the effects of redlining. For those people who don't really know what that is, maybe you can just give a brief explanation of: when we talk about redlining, what are we talking about? 

When we talk about digital redlining, we're talking about the topography of the digital divide. The term "digital divide" was coined in the 1990s, around 1994. There was a series of reports by the NTIA called Falling Through The Net, and at that time, they identified the groups of people that were at risk of being left behind, and they were rural, low-income, and Black and Brown communities. Today, the people who are at risk of being left behind are rural, tribal, low-income, and Black and Brown communities. And Black and Brown communities, these are communities that have faced historic underinvestment, right? And the term redlining comes from the housing programs back in the '30s, where certain neighborhoods were deemed too financially risky.

And it was intentional. It was basically to not allow Black people to move into white communities in cities and in suburbs, and it was an intentional policy of the federal government, which was then adopted by banks, and so forth. That is still living with us when we look at the digital divide, right?

The thing is that...if you had a topography of exclusion at one point in time, unless you take some serious, deliberate action to address it, the simplest course of action would be for it to continue on and on, and for additional exclusions to just get layered on top of each other. So when we talk about this in terms of the digital divide, it really means that those are the communities that are still being under-invested in for access. They have worse internet in terms of not having the latest technology. They don't have the best deals being offered to them. The Markup did a study a couple of years ago that was in 38 cities, where they found that Black, Brown, or poor communities paid more for worse internet. They were getting worse speeds, and they tended to have plans that cost more. 

I want to go back to something really quickly and ask you about the BEAD Program. Initially, when that program came out, it was really prioritizing fiber. You mentioned that now it's technology agnostic or technology neutral, as some people would say. And so we're getting other kinds of technologies. Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What are your thoughts on that?

At Fiber Connect, that sounds like a loaded question, Maggie. It really depends on how you wanna think about broadband, right?

If you are of the mindset that it's a service that just gets beamed down from the sky, sure, you can think of that as a satellite being a perfectly fine option. And nothing against satellite. When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, and people lost all connectivity, satellite was a fantastic backup. But if you want to think of it as infrastructure upon which other things can be built, other services can be provided, it'll take jobs to actually install the infrastructure and maintain it. If you want to think of it as an infrastructure investment in a community, then you kinda have to think about it as fiber, and you're missing this opportunity. Because it's not as if resources weren't available. Congress had already allocated the money to make this a largely fiber program. West Virginia's plan was ready to be sent out, and that was going to be 100 percent fiber and still $95 million under budget. With their change in rules, they had to scale back some of their fiber deployments to 95% fiber. They've done a great job. But what was wrong with 100 percent fiber? 

As we're wrapping things up here, we've been talking about access still being an issue. We've been talking about affordability still being an issue...In 10 years, if everything could go right, if all the money can be deployed, what do you think we'll be talking about in 10 years when we look at this issue? 

What I hope we're talking about is having a larger conversation about where technology should fit into our lives. I'm hoping that questions around equitable access to technology have been solved, and what we're talking about is ensuring that we are all receiving equitable benefits from technology. If we are racing towards AI—and that's going to be adopted whether we like it or not—in everything, we should actually be having these conversations now, but I'm hoping that I will not be trying to convince people that everybody needs internet access in 10 years. I will hopefully be arguing for ensuring that everyone benefits from the internet, AI, quantum, and the other infrastructures and technologies of the future. 

Quick Bits

• FCC Proposes Modernization of High-Cost Program
• SpaceX: Sunset High-Cost Programs 
• FCC to Streamline Broadband Data Collection Processes
• Sens Luján, Matsui Introduce Legislation to Expand Digital Opportunity, Inclusion, and Literacy
• Eight Leading U.S. Communications Firms Form C2 ISAC to Strengthen Cybersecurity Collaboration

Weekend Reads

• Best Practices for Ensuring Digital Inclusion Program Impact
• 2026 Broadband Pricing Index
• Where does federal AI spending stand in 2026?

ICYMI from Benton

• The AI Infrastructure Revolution Happening in Your Community
• One Year Without the Digital Equity Act
• NTIA Encourages ISPs to Ensure State BEAD Contracts Comply With Agency Priorities
• A New Bill Aims To Track BEAD Progress
• The FCC is Proposing Changes in How it Maps the Digital Divide
• Is the High Cost Fund Ripe for Modernization?
• The Rural Broadband Protection Act Meets a High-Cost Program at a Crossroads

Upcoming Events

May 27—Champion Your Health

June 3—How AI Is Reshaping American Enterprise, and Being Shaped by It

June 10—Consumer Protection and Accessibility Advisory Committee Meeting

June 11—Don’t Stop BEAD-lievin’: Tracking Broadband Deployment Progress, Pitfalls, and Policy Implications (Federal Communications Bar Association)

June 25—June 2026 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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