Pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process has taken too long. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation that authorized BEAD was signed into law in November 2021. A few states are now opening a grant portal to accept BEAD grant applications—nearly three years after the legislation was passed. Not all grant programs have taken this long. An interesting contrast to BEAD is another huge-dollar federal grant program, the Capital Project Fund (CPF). That was a $10 billion broadband grant program that was part of legislation for the American Rescue Plan that was enacted in March 2021. The two grant programs have a few things in common. Both are to build broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas. Both grant programs give federal money to States to choose grant winners. But there is a stark difference in the way the two programs have been operated; the biggest difference between the two grant programs is that Treasury fully trusted States to make grant awards within some rule boundaries, while NTIA micromanaged the process from beginning to end.

Gov Kay Ivey (R-AL) has awarded nearly $42 million for “last-mile” high-speed internet projects in 23 Alabama counties. The latest Capital Projects Fund grants will cover 2,347 miles and provide broadband availability to more than 15,000 households, businesses and community anchor institutions in the state that currently do not have access to high-speed internet. In February 2024, Governor Ivey awarded $148.3 million in Capital Projects Fund grants for broadband accessibility in more than two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties. The grants awarded today are from the remaining funds. The Capital Projects Fund program is supported by the state’s share of the federal American Rescue Plan Act funds. It is one of several sources of funds to expand high-speed internet services to Alabamians. The Alabama Digital Expansion Division, which is part of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) and was created by legislation signed by Governor Ivey, has been instrumental in the state’s broadband expansion. The full list of awards can be found here.

Per the most recent American Community Survey data, among cities with 100,000 or more households, the two worst-connected cities, Detroit (MI) and Cleveland (OH), have also had the biggest percentage reductions in households without wireline broadband connections since 2019. Detroit added more than 41,000 households with cable, fiber or DSL subscriptions between 2019 and 2023, even while its total household count shrank by about 12,000; this took the city’s percentage of households without wireline from 46.3% down to 32.2%. In the same four years, Cleveland added almost 25,000 wireline broadband accounts while losing about 3,000 households, reducing its no-wireline percentage from 46.0% to 32.2%. In 2024 the big question is: Will the improved home broadband access rates in Cleveland, Detroit, and other U.S. cities survive the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program, and the resulting bigger monthly bills that started hitting many of their newly connected households in June? 

The Federal Communications Commission announced a $13 million settlement with AT&T to resolve an Enforcement Bureau investigation into the company’s supply chain integrity and whether it failed to protect the information of AT&T customers in connection with a data breach of a vendor’s cloud environment. AT&T used the vendor to generate and host personalized video content, including billing and marketing videos, for AT&T customers. Under AT&T’s contracts, the vendor should have destroyed or returned AT&T customer information when no longer necessary to fulfill contractual obligations, which ended years before the breach occurred. AT&T failed to ensure the vendor: (1) adequately protected the customer information, and (2) returned or destroyed it as required by contract. 

Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, the National Economic Council, and private industry all dropped by downtown Washington for the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit on September 17. And with the first presidential election of the generative AI era a mere seven weeks away, much of their attention was turned to ensuring its security and trustworthiness. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) described how artificial intelligence demands a response from each sector of government. “I think you’re going to find artificial intelligence legislation embedded in almost every single piece of legislation that passes the House and the Senate in the coming years,” Rounds said. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that his department was locking in on instances of AI being used for the “dissemination of disinformation” specifically from overseas, with unnamed “adverse nation states propagating narratives that seek to influence the voting public.” Cait Conley, senior advisor to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, echoed his concern, saying that old propaganda tactics could be “supercharged” by AI in November’s elections.