BEAD framed as end of one off grants for advanced telecommunications infrastructure

The fiber broadband industry is experiencing a historic moment. According to Joseph Wender, Director of Capital Projects Fund at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, never before (and likely never again) have multiple government agencies provided tens of billions of dollars in funding to provide affordable, reliable, high-speed internet for all Americans and close the digital divide once and for all. “We are living in a historic moment and it is exciting, which makes our jobs much more important. We have to get it right this time,” Wender said on this week’s Fiber for Breakfast episode.

https://fiberbroadband.org/2024/01/17/making-a-down-payment-on-affordable-reliable-high-speed-internet-for-all/

Wender is correct. The United States is at a policy inflection point on the future of the nation’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure. It’s at this point because it lacks a national strategy to guide its deployment, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) observed in 2022 and 2023.

While the GAO didn’t specifically say so, the main casualty of this policy failure is the now long tardy modernization of copper telephone lines that reached nearly every address in in the 20^th century to fiber optic lines with the proven capacity to carry high quality digital voice, data and video. It should have been completed by the start of the second decade of the 21^st.

That has led policymakers to spend the last three decades defining the issue by its resulting symptoms of constrained access and affordability that worsened a decade later with the public health restrictions imposed in response to a viral pandemic. That spawned according to the GAO 133 disparate federal funding programs administered by 15 agencies, mostly one off grant programs aimed at treating constrained capacity by boosting “broadband” bandwidth.

That has begun to shift somewhat in the latest and largest grant program, the $43.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) state grant subsidy program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). BEAD expresses a clear preference that the subsidies be spent on fiber as the best long-term value for taxpayer dollars.

To the point of this article and others like it, there’s a tone of finality associated with these one time grant subsidy programs that has accompanied BEAD. It’s been described as “once in a lifetime,” and “once in a generation.” Hence, warnings by Wender to “get it right this time,” because the tap is being shut off and the pinata party will soon end.