Big ISPs and BEAD

Within a month after the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program was announced, there were a lot of predictions that the program was going to be a huge giveaway to the largest telephone and cable companies. There was some reason for that outlook, since there had been huge giveaways to large companies in the past, such as the $10 billion Connect America Fund Phase II fiasco. I felt optimistic from the beginning that BEAD would not all go to big companies due to the fact that BEAD was being driven by States, and not by federal grant programs. I expected that States would have widely varying ideas on how to award the grants. States lost a lot of the flexibility in choosing different types of winners after the National Telecommunications and Information Administration revised the BEAD grants to basically be a one-round reverse auction. We’re now starting to see some of the preliminary BEAD results, and it’s a mixed bag—with some states favoring large companies and others not.