CCG Consulting

CenturyLink told the Federal Communications Commission recently that it is defaulting on 41,000 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund locations spread across eight states and 153 Census block groups. There are a number of consequences of this default. First, this has now happened after states made Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment maps and allocation. That makes it likely that nobody will be bringing improved broadband to the default areas. If the defaults had happened earlier, these areas could have been rolled into the BEAD process.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has leaned into supporting fixed wireless throughout the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. In June 2025, NTIA surprised State Broadband Offices by announcing they would need to remove areas already served by unlicensed fixed wireless from BEAD eligibility. NTIA's new BEAD guidelines, which prioritize the cheapest technology, make it likely that many awards will go to wireless internet service providers that rely heavily on CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum.

The Federal Communications Commission recently issued a proposed new set of rules in the ongoing pole docket, which also solicits feedback on additional questions and includes some clarifications of earlier orders. The primary focus of the new rules is to define requirements for handling requests to add fiber to 3,000 or more poles at a time. This order has not been approved yet, but it is included for consideration in the FCC’s July 2025 meeting and is likely to be approved.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill creates some significant new benefits for building broadband networks:

One big change coming from the current administration is that the federal government is shoving payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency down to the States. The administration talked about completely closing FEMA, but recently said that they would keep the agency open in the future. But with the budget cuts that came out of the "One Big, Beautiful Bill," it’s clear that the federal share for paying for disasters will go down, meaning the State share will increase.

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America.

The guessing game is over since the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has released the final rules about how the new Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant process will work. It’s still impossible to make any guesses about the percentage of BEAD that will be awarded to fiber or other technologies. It’s clear that a lot of State Broadband Offices (SBOs) still want to maximize the amount of awards made to fiber.

We’ve had a quiet policy change lately, and satellite broadband is starting to be considered broadband by the federal government, and from a policy perspective, it is a big deal. The biggest change came with the recent Notice from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that reshuffled Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grant rules and put satellite on an equal footing with fiber, fixed wireless, and other broadband technologies.

The Computer & Communication Industry Association released a paper recently warning about the impact of imposing Universal Service Fund fees on what it characterizes as cloud services. CCIA is an association that lobbies on behalf of some of the largest web companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Cloudflare.

It’s clear that the new National Telecommunications and Information Administration guidelines for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program will both significantly pare down the overall outlay from the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program and also will reduce the amount of the grant funding that will be used for fiber construction. Any shift away from fiber will have a definite impact on fiber cable vendors like Corning, CommScope, Lightera, and Prysmian. Fiber vendors love rural projects like BEAD since low population density means a lot of miles of fiber are needed.