The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program presents an opportunity for NTCA members and others committed to rural vitality to deliver the broadband that rural America deserves. Our job is to act immediately and forcefully in a focused way to turn this opportunity into reality, even after all the twists and turns in the program’s development to date. NTCA suggests three specific areas to focus on in getting BEAD implementation right:

1. Only “scalable” projects can be deemed a priority for funding. It is now up to each state to determine whether a proposed network technology is scalable and worthy of priority. This means the states are both authorized and empowered to do the kind of intensive review lacking in prior broadband funding programs, and they should seize this opportunity. 
2. To measure and validate the reasonableness of cost, states should use the various models previously procured by agencies and/or published by stakeholders showing the costs of deploying networks in rural areas.
3. The states still have an important (albeit somewhat rushed) role to play in refining location eligibility. The Notice of Funding Opportunity directs states to reach out to entities claiming to offer unlicensed fixed wireless service on the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map and require them to “submit evidence that BEAD funding is not required” for certain locations showing as served on the map. Here again, the Notice gives states flexibility to define the process for updating the eligibility map—for example, a state should consider what “evidence” is required, taking into account what the National Broadband Map does and does not represent.

Fiber has officially taken the backseat now that the federal government rewrote the rules to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. But the changes don’t mean much to the equipment vendors that have already moved on to greener pastures. The rural broadband hype has simmered down for vendors like Adtran, Corning, and CommScope, who are instead chasing gains in lucrative areas like long-haul fiber and data center connectivity. With BEAD deployments delayed until 2026 or beyond, vendors have even more reason to keep at those side hustles. “There is going to be a percentage of applicants in each state that don’t re-apply, because of the time and costs associated,” Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen said. That said, fiber vendors likely won’t lose out with their larger operator customers. Providers with the resources to reapply for BEAD will do so, he added, and will likely pick up broadband serviceable locations from the smaller providers that drop out.

On June 6, 2025, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program Restructuring Policy Notice. This Policy Notice outlined new requirements for states and territories to follow when implementing the BEAD programs. The requirements set forth in this document explicitly override all other guidance documents specifically related to the Virginia BEAD application process for deployment projects. Some areas of change include:

• Elimination of Regulatory Requirements
• Technology Neutrality
• Benefit of the Bargain Round
• Letter of Intent Requirements

Sen Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sounded the alarm about the dangers of the Republican plan to auction 800 megahertz of spectrum that is essential to national security, aviation safety and America’s innovation economy in a one-on-one conversation with Dr. Tom Karako, Director of the Missile Defense Project and Senior Fellow in Defense & Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During the discussion, Sen Cantwell and Dr. Karako touched on a wide-range of issues and concerns related to the electromagnetic spectrum and the current debate over the potential spectrum auctions included in the Republican reconciliation bill, from why spectrum matters to the American people in their daily lives, to its vital importance for our information economy and, specifically, just how consequential it is to protect the parts of the spectrum critical to our national security. On the dangers of the Republican Spectrum Auction Plan, Sen Cantwell said, “I think it's a very dangerous proposal, because it really doesn't look at all the details about the incumbent users, in this case, a lot of military applications, and plan for what is the use of the future of that spectrum, if it's allocated to the private sector? And while we know we have an unbelievable need for new spectrum, the question is: How can we do things like dynamic spectrum sharing and testbed and really understand what these applications are and what they're going to do to create interference?"

Wi-Fi 7 has been around for over a year. If you haven’t noticed this latest generation of Wi-Fi technology, it might be because it is still just gaining a foothold. But even for those who haven’t yet heard of Wi-Fi 7, one can surmise that a new technology generation will have better performance than what’s come before. This article looks at the growth of Wi-Fi 7 in the United States, then compares its performance against prior Wi-Fi generations across top fixed internet service providers. Some key takeaways:

• Wi-Fi 7 adoption is less than 2 percent, according to its share of fixed samples of Speedtest user data. ISPs are beginning to include Wi-Fi 7 routers in their service bundle, which is the primary means for households to acquire routers.
• Wi-Fi 7 speed is faster, as expected, even delivering gigabit speeds for one fiber ISP. However, cable providers, which are competitive with fiber speeds on the downlink, have much slower uplink speeds and more lag on latency. Cable companies have 30 percent more of the older Wi-Fi 4 and 5 routers than fiber companies, constraining the potential customer experience.
• Net Promoter Score improves with each generation of Wi-Fi, with an immense gulf from -38 for Wi-Fi 4 to +45 for Wi-Fi 7.

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners has struck a deal for internet-service provider Hotwire Communications, making a multibillion-dollar bet on the growing industry for next-generation broadband infrastructure. The deal is expected to value Hotwire at around $7 billion, including debt. An announcement is expected soon. Hotwire is a closely held internet service provider that operates in commercial settings and residential communities, according to its website. Its network runs across Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and California. Brookfield is set to take over the business from Blackstone, which invested about $1 billion in 2021 through its Infrastructure Partners and Tactical Opportunities funds. 

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future. Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals and ambitions in the near term, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar. Framed less as technological objectives and more as existential imperatives, they include aligning AI with the interests of humanity; creating an artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems; merging with that superintelligence to achieve immortality (or something close to it); establishing a permanent, self-­sustaining colony on Mars; and, ultimately, spreading out across the cosmos. While there’s a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits. In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker calls this triumvirate of beliefs the “ideology of technological salvation” and warns that tech titans are using it to steer humanity in a dangerous direction.