BEAD Broadband Builds Must Clear a Thicket of Overlapping Permits

The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program will fund construction of broadband infrastructure to unserved and underserved locations across the United States. But before construction can begin, internet service providers must first clear federal environmental and historic-preservation review, including National Environmental Policy Act, and then navigate a broader thicket of environmental, cultural, land-use, right-of-way, easement, and jurisdictional permitting requirements. These include reviews of wetland and floodplain crossings, air-quality clearances, authorization to cross or attach to federal, state, and tribal land, railroad and utility crossing agreements, and county- and municipal-level construction permitting. Each permitting requirement triggers its own review process by separate authorities that take place over discrete timelines. These processes can quickly become burdensome for ISPs, especially on projects with firm deployment deadlines, as in the case of BEAD. To quantify the breadth of this exposure, in the context of BEAD, we overlaid 2,942,440 funded locations across 3,783 terrestrial projects in the 50 states against 126 federal, state, and local permitting layers, and recorded, for every location, which triggers it sits inside or near. To make exposure comparable across states that define projects differently, we divide each project by county and report on the resulting project area, a project’s footprint within one county, yielding 6,933 project areas. Satellite-served locations are excluded throughout, because they require no physical plant and therefore no construction permits.