Universal Broadband

The Fiscal Year 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations Act provides a total of $68.537 billion in discretionary funding.  The bill provides $10.8 billion for the Department of Commerce.

The Department of Commerce's Inspector General asked industry stakeholders to identify challenges they are facing with broadband programmatic deployment to unserved and underserved locations.

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) announced over $50 million in grants to expand broadband access to an estimated 8,900 homes and businesses throughout Minnesota. Twenty four broadband expansion projects will receive grants from the Department of Employment and Economic Development's (DEED) Office of Broadband Development, helping deploy new broadband infrastructure around Minnesota.

This white paper ultimately represents the story of how our newly formed office found an efficient and effective way to address the digital divide in our community through the development of a novel local benefit program, as told by our associate Augusta Groeschel-Johnson.

From all over the country, I’m hearing stories about internet service providers who are gaming the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband maps in order to block areas from being eligible for the BEAD grants. It’s relatively easy for a provider to do this. All that’s needed is to declare the capability to deliver a speed of 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps. Providers can largely do this with impunity. The archaic FCC rules allow providers to claim ‘up-to’ marketing speeds in the maps.

California's Broadband Loan Loss Reserve Fund is a $500 million fund that provides a credit enhancement related to the financing of local broadband infrastructure development. The reserve fund expands the ability of local governments, tribes and non-profits to secure financing for building last-mile projects, with an emphasis on public broadband networks. The Fund will provide collateral to local governments to enable more favorable borrowing rates and terms for bonds issued to deploy broadband infrastructure. The Fund was established in 2021. The benefits of the Fund include:

At least 13 states intend to undertake “nondeployment” projects as part of their funding under the $42.5-billion BEAD program, according to their initial proposals. The number of states that expect money left over after allocating funds for all unserved and underserved locations could be higher, and perhaps considerably so.

Elaina Zempel, manager of the Wyoming broadband office, laments that the office didn’t have more funds to distribute in its recent Capital Projects Fund (CPF) program, which awarded funding to network operators to cover some of the costs of deploying broadband to 15,000 unserved and underserved locations. Fortunately, NTIA allocated $347.9 million in rural broadband funding to Wyoming for the BEAD rural broadband funding program, so there is still an opportunity to fund many of the failed requests from Wyoming’s 

The Federal Communications Commission formally notified Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) providers that, due to a lack of additional funding from Congress, the agency will only be able to fully fund the program through the month of April. The Public Notice also (1) provides guidance on the May 2024 partial reimbursement month; (2) reminds participating providers of the notices they must send to ACP households; and (3) provides guidance on the consumer protections for ACP households during wind-down and after the ACP ends.

From an internet service provider perspective, the BEAD grant program has progressed at a glacial scale. The BEAD grants were signed into law on November 15, 2021, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Folks in the industry assumed that BEAD would follow a timeline similar to the earlier grants that were awarded using federal CARES and ARPA funding, and vendors certainly thought that grant awards would start in 2023 with construction underway by 2024. And then nothing happened. The BEAD process got bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy.