Wait and See: North Dakota Navigates the BEAD Changes

North Dakota State Broadband Program Director Brian Newby prefers not to beat his head against a federal agency over which he has no control. “Just tell me the rules. We’ll follow the rules.” Officially, North Dakota only has about 2,000 locations left without broadband, though Newby thinks that after the bogus broadband locations are removed, the number may be closer to 1,000. Those locations are spread throughout the state—Newby and his team call them “Swiss cheese locations”—and, as a result, the state didn’t receive many Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment applications when their application window first opened. “There must be two types of states,” Newby said. Some “have a crazy number of bidders. And then I think there’s a fair number of states like us, where we’ve just had two bidders.” Newby hopes the two providers who originally bid for—and were preliminarily selected for—BEAD funds will bid again in the new "Benefit of the Bargain" round. “Now that they know this is kind of a final round, they may look at the state and see if there are [other locations] they want to bid on.”