Households in rural America are overcoming significant headwinds as they sign up for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) benefit at a higher rate than urban counterparts. Through April 2023, ACP enrollment data shows that: 15% of all rural households have enrolled in ACP and 14% of households in metro or urban areas have enrolled in the benefit. Even this modest difference is striking given the tensions that buffet rural residents as they consider enrolling in ACP. On the one hand, rural areas have characteristics that improve ACP enrollment according to the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s Affordable Connectivity Program Enrollment Performance Tool .  Nearly half (49%) of rural households qualify for ACP compared with 40% of non-rural ones. This gap is largely because there are more lower income households in rural parts of the country. Some 36% of rural households have annual incomes at or below 200% of the Federal poverty level (FPL) in contrast to the 28% figure for households in non-rural areas. There is a positive correlation between areas with a large share of eligible households and ACP enrollment.

President Joe Biden has rolled out his Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) plan, which will be subsidized by $42 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That is an obscene amount of money to invest in technology that will be obsolete by the time it's built. A 2022 report by America's Communication Association (ACA), which lobbies for more than 500 small- and medium-sized internet service companies, found that nearly 88 percent of households already live where at least two competitors offer 25/3 Mbps service, and 85 percent lived where at least one operator offers 100/20 Mbps service and a competitor offers 25/3 Mbps service. On current trends, the ACA projects that 95 percent will have access to at least 100/20 Mbps service by 2025. Providing access to high-speed internet services to the vast majority of Americans was not achieved by spreading around government largesse. The US Telecom Association reports that private companies invested $86 billion in just 2021 (latest figures) to build out their broadband networks further. In other words, U.S. private broadband companies are already providing access to faster and increasingly cheaper internet services and, on current trends, will finish the job well before Biden's BEAD boondoggle gets off the ground.

At a time when state and federal governments are funding numerous broadband deployment projects, Utah’s long-lived broadband map has been a big asset. Utah was more successful than any other state in challenging the locations database for the Federal Communications Commission's broadband map, explained Rebecca Dilg, Director of the Utah Broadband Center. The state is well positioned to determine eligible locations for the upcoming Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, Dilg noted. Utah was one of multiple states that used funding from the broadband stimulus programs created in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to create a broadband map. The state also created a broadband office back at that time to administer federal funding that came in, and when that funding ran out, the state legislature continued to fund the program for a few years, but eventually closed the office down in 2018. At that time, Dilg was working for the state in rural economic development, and when the first broadband office closed, she was asked to handle the remaining responsibilities that the office handled, including maintaining the broadband map – or, more correctly, the broadband maps, as various overlays enable users to display various parameters, including provider, speed, and more. Moving forward, the office will be responsible for administering $317 million in BEAD funding that has been allotted to the state. The office is now in the process of putting its initial BEAD proposal together, which must be approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Dilg is hopeful that the BEAD funding, in combination with required provider matching funds, will be sufficient to make broadband available to all eligible locations in the state.

The Federal Communications Commission is once more facing pressure to go back on its decision allowing Ligado to deploy a 5G network using L-Band spectrum in the US, after rival satellite company Iridium filed a complaint in June 2023. Despite major pushback from the Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal agencies over GPS interference concerns, the FCC in 2020 unanimously approved, with conditions, Ligado’s application to deploy the low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band to support 5G and IoT services. Iridium filed its objection to the L-band network with the FCC just weeks after Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) rejected Ligado's application for authorization in Canada, also because of GPS interference concerns. Iridium told the FCC that the order authorizing Ligado to operate ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) services in L-band spectrum will cause “significant interference into Iridium user terminals, which enable reliable connections and critical communications at sea, in the air and in remote lands, as well as to government and military users around the world.” However, in response to the most recent protest, Ligado commented that Iridum's filing “badly misrepresents” the ISED decision. Since the FCC authorized the company's L-band use in the US, Ligado said it has made more than half a dozen filings to ensure it hasn't and will not take terrestrial deployment action until it has successfully worked with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and other federal stakeholders “to resolve in a fair and reasonable manner certain matters related to the company’s terrestrial spectrum.” The Ligado statement added, "as such, there remains nothing in Iridium’s filings for the [FCC] to address."