With the incoming Trump administration and the ascendance of GOP leaders taking aim at key aspects of broadband expansion initiatives embedded in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, industry insiders expect the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program to likely get a major facelift in the coming months.

GOP Senate leaders have signaled they will push for BEAD to be scaled back or reconfigured.

One way they may do that is to remove the law’s preference for funding fiber network deployments and create a path for subsidizing Musk’s satellite Internet company, arguing that Starlink would be a more cost-effective solution to bring broadband to rural America.

Late last week, in fact, NTIA released its “Final Guidance for BEAD Funding of Alternative Broadband Technology.” And while the updated guidelines still considers fiber deployments as “priority broadband projects,” the agency administering the BEAD program now explicitly says that states can award “LEO Capacity Subgrants.”

North Carolina’s Roanoke Cooperative continues to make steady progress with expansion of its Fybe last mile fiber network within The Tar Heel State.

Cooperative officials tell ILSR that the cooperative and a coalition of organizations across North Carolina have major expansion plans in the works, starting with a fiber build in Halifax County, population 47,298.

Currently, Fybe provides fiber broadband service to around 6,000 subscribers in North Carolina, but thanks to an historic infusion of federal and state grants, the hope is to expand fiber access to the bulk of unserved addresses county-wide.

Fybe COO Bo Coughlin tells ILSR that the lion’s share of the cooperative's upcoming efforts to bring affordable connectivity to unserved and under-served portions of North Carolina will be under the banner of a coalition dubbed Encore, a nonprofit collaboration between MCNC, North Carolina Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMC), and Fybe.

“MCNC has been around for 40 years,” Coughlin notes. “It started as an economic Development institution funded by the state. Their goal was originally to help birth the microchip industry in RTP down in Raleigh, but today they provide transport to around a hundred universities, charter schools, and community anchor institutions across nearly 100 counties.”

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Back in April, Fybe won a $9 million Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grant to help bring fiber to the largely underserved, heavily-rural residents of Martin, Bertie, Halifax, and Hertford counties.

“So currently, we pass about 5,000 total homes across Northampton and Halifax,” Coughlin said of Fybe’s current footprint.

States wary about the restrictions and delays with looming federal broadband grants are poised to put significant taxpayer resources into Starlink and other low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. The problem: such services often aren’t affordable, raise environmental questions, and may struggle to keep pace with consumer capacity demand.

Back in March, Maine unveiled a $5.4 million initiative to offer Starlink Low Earth Orbit (LEO) terminals to 9,000 state residents outside the reach of broadband from existing terrestrial providers.

An estimated 9,000 locations in the state (1.5 percent of residents) have no access to broadband, mostly peppered across rural Oxford, Penobscot, and Aroostook counties.

While well intentioned, the state’s initiative immediately sparked a debate about whether Starlink is the best use of taxpayer resources.

Starlink May Be Part of Solution

LEO satellite broadband has understandable allure for state broadband offices tasked with showing the federal government they have a solution for every premise – household and business – in the state. Depending on geography and state, some of these locations may require $100,000 for a terrestrial wireline connection.

Many of these unserved locations may be inhabited for a few weeks a year by the family of billionaires or 52 weeks a year by a family barely able to afford the fuel to live there. Spending $100,000 on that household may mean tens of other households see no improvement or have to settle for worse technology. And depending on who you ask, NTIA either demands that the state actually connect that household or simply have a feasible plan to achieve that connection.

The Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas say they recently finished delivering fiber broadband capability to more than one million Arkansans as part of a $4.66 billion expansion.

More than 40,000 miles of fiber have been installed by 17 cooperative broadband providers, including 15 local broadband providers, one wholesale broadband provider, and one middle-mile fiber company.

In a prepared statement, Arkansas cooperatives indicate they have $2.2 billion in additional projects lined up connecting an additional 13,000 residents in the “Natural State.” Once completed, Arkansas cooperatives will have deployed 53,000 miles of fiber and connected 1.2 million state residents to fiber.

Informed by their efforts at rural electrification nearly a century earlier, U.S. electrical cooperatives have increasingly been pushing into fiber broadband deployment. Initially as a way to better monitor and manage complex modern electrical grids, then ultimately as a way to extend access to predominately rural customers trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Nearly 80 percent of the state cooperatives’ investment in fiber infrastructure has been self-funded without grant subsidies, the coalition notes. Many of the markets they’ve targeted have long been neglected by regional cable and phone giants that believe the investment into rural counties isn’t worth the time and resources, or won’t be profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street.  

Montgomery County Maryland has been awarded the “Best Municipal or Public Connectivity Program,” honored as a 2024 Broadband Nation Award winner for its ongoing efforts to expand affordable broadband access and help bridge the digital divide.

Montgomery County has worked extensively for years to connect municipal services and key anchor institutions, but more recently has begun leveraging that infrastructure to expand access to the most vulnerable. The county’s efforts have two key components:

FiberNet is a 650-mile municipal fiber communication network that provides broadband services to 558 County, State, municipal, educational, and anchor institutions.

MoCoNet is the County’s residential broadband network that provides free 300/300 megabit per second (Mbps) Internet service for residents at affordable housing locations. Originally providing a symmetrical 100 Mbps service, the network was recently upgraded to 300 Mbps, and is currently available to low-income housing communities.

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Montgomery Connects Program Director Mitsuko Herrera tells ILSR that the county just received a $10 million grant from the State of Maryland to expand FiberNet and MoCoNet’s free 300 Mbps offering to 1,547 low-income and affordable housing units at seven properties operated by the County’s Housing Opportunities Commission.

The county’s also in the middle of upgrading its core fiber infrastructure to deliver significantly faster overall speeds.  

Among the burgeoning number of Tribal networks being built across Indian Country, a new fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network spanning the Southern Ute Indian Reservation is unique.

When service was lit up in Ignacio, Colorado in May, the network became the only open access network owned by a Tribal government, providing its residents with a choice between two different Internet Service Providers (ISP) offering lightning-fast connection speeds.

Five years in the making, the Southern Ute network is not only the first Tribally-owned open access network, it is also among the first of the new fiber projects funded by the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP) to start offering services.

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With a strong commitment from Tribal leadership, savvy decision-making, and strategic vision, the Tribe has been able to fundamentally reshape the broadband market in its region, increasing speeds and competition while lowering prices.

Slow Speeds and High Prices Fuel Mission to ‘Bust That Monopoly’

As with many other Tribally-owned networks, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe’s broadband journey began with a recognition that the existing telecommunications infrastructure on the Reservation simply could not meet the needs of the modern moment.

Tribal Council Chairman Melvin J. Baker tells ILSR that many in Tribal leadership “realized we’ve needed it for quite some time.”

In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, ILSR celebrates the growing number of Tribal nations exercising digital sovereignty by building Tribally-owned broadband networks.

Our freshly updated Indigenous Networks map and census highlights the burgeoning Tribal broadband movement, offering a window into this critical work across Indian Country.

Our updates underscore how much has changed since 2020 when ILSR first undertook research on Tribal networks. When we began tracking the development of Tribal broadband, of the 574 federally-recognized Tribes in the nation, there were about 40 Tribal networks offering service.

Four years later, there are now twice as many active networks in operation with 50 more Tribes who have secured funding to build their own networks, thanks in part to unprecedented federal investments in Tribal broadband. An additional four dozen Tribes have expressed interest in following suit, determined to close the digital divide in what has historically been the least connected part of the United States.

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Many Tribal broadband networks that we previously identified have continued to thrive. Others have been able to upgrade their services to offer fiber service, the gold standard of Internet connectivity.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of new Tribal broadband programs have launched, with networks coming online each year and many others on the horizon, signaling a period of tremendous growth in Tribal broadband.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office has unveiled a new round of broadband grants that will expand fiber access to unserved homes and businesses across 23 Alabama counties. This latest round of grants should help fund 2,347 miles of new fiber deployment, bringing broadband availability to more than 15,000 locations scattered across the Yellowhammer state.

The funding – made largely possible by 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money that both of the state’s Senators voted against – comes on the heels of another $150 million broadband funding round announced back in February.

“With these latest grants, Alabama takes another all-important step to supplying high-speed Internet availability to more rural Alabama communities and neighborhoods,” Ivey said in a statement. “Upon completion of these projects, more children will have better learning opportunities, more businesses will have greater opportunities to compete worldwide, and emergency response departments and medical clinics will be able to offer improved services.”

Both funding rounds were heavily dominated by large private telecoms like AT&T, Charter, and Brightspeed. But the state has also been doling out some sizable awards to local cooperatives in a bid to shore up rural fiber access.

Choptank Electric Cooperative says the Denton, Maryland-based co-op is making significant progress on efforts to deliver fiber access to largely underserved residents of the Old Line State.

In 2021, Choptank decided to begin extending residential fiber broadband service to the cooperative’s 56,000 residential, commercial, and industrial metered accounts scattered across nine counties on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Since that promise, the cooperative says it has passed more than 13,000 locations statewide.

In a meeting with Worcester County Commissioners in early September, Choptank officials stated they’ve delivered fiber to 1,112 locations in Worcester County and have 471 currently active subscribers. Just about 42 percent of county residents that have access to Choptank’s fiber offerings have subscribed. The cooperative has received roughly $1 million in county funds.

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Choptank provides residential customers three tiers of fiber service: symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $85 a month; symmetrical 450 Mbps service for $100 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $140 a month; and symmetrical 2.5 Gbps service for $280 a month.