In June, the Biden administration allocated $42.45 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding among states—the largest single pot of federal broadband spending in our country’s history. Biden officials at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) made these allocations despite repeated requests from lawmakers and communities across the country to first improve the data underlying NTIA’s funding decisions. Now that NTIA has made BEAD allocations, however, it appears that the program will waste billions of dollars in duplicative subsidies and divert funds away from truly unserved rural areas. This report analyzes the current state of BEAD funding, on a per-beneficiary basis and in the context of three other recent federal programs that already doled out $17 billion for broadband deployment. The report offers three key findings:

1. The Biden administration’s BEAD allocations provide ten states and territories more than $10,000 per unserved location—including a galling $547,254 per unserved location in Washington, DC
2. Because the BEAD program did not consider whether a location would be served in the near future through funding from a previous federal program, it allocated funding to over five million locations that are already being funded by other federal programs. If funding from other programs had been considered, seven states would have had zero unserved locations. As a result, the billions in taxpayer dollars sent to these states will be diverted to purposes other than connecting unserved Americans.
3. The Biden administration’s technology bias against non-fiber broadband will drive up costs by billions of dollars and likely deprive some communities of any broadband access at all. Further, some of the “unserved” locations that will receive taxpayer-subsidized fiber-to-the-home service include mansions, beachfront resort communities, and mountain vacation homes.

Texas could have nearly $5 billion directed toward expanding broadband availability statewide if voters approve a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. Texas will receive more than $3.3 billion in federal money—more than any other state—to help expand broadband access. Texans will vote on whether to create a Broadband Infrastructure Fund allocating $1.5 billion in state money to expand broadband availability. As of 2022, almost 2.8 million Texas households and 7 million people in the state lack broadband access, according to the state comptroller.

Mobile communications markets are usually characterized by a limited number of operators. Despite being markets exhibiting high concentration, many mobile network operator mergers have been recently proposed and approved subject to remedies (or commitments by the merging parties). The research investigates the merger induced effects on consumer surplus, in which a model has three firms selling horizontally and vertically differentiated products. Findings show: joint management of spectrum enables merging parties to offer higher quality service—for which customers are willing to pay more; mergers may benefit consumers even in the absence of any cost-related efficiencies; and when the merger has a negative impact on consumer surplus, remedies based on reallocation of spectrum are not very likely to change this outcome.

I’m here to talk about why and how against this backdrop we as a nation need to graduate to a fundamentally new mindset with regard to how our government partners with and approaches technology … leaving behind a mindset rooted in fear and articulated through regulatory fiat … and re-rooting in the modern-day reality of an interconnected planet driven by the tools and technology of broadband. It is time to arrive at a global understanding … with America in the lead…of a new approach…based in collaboration and partnership around unlocking shared possibilities and yes, managing, collective risk. It’s the right moment to have these conversations and pivot to this new paradigm. Fearless is not the absence of fear. It’s the ability to move forward—smartly, effectively, collaboratively and to the broadest possible benefit—despite risks. We need to be fearless in pursuit of all that innovation promises. We need to be relentless in our efforts to ensure the promise and power of broadband can reach every part of our nation efficiently, quickly and affordably. And, together, we need to be fierce in defense of the cybersecurity partnership that will make it possible.

Black Rock, AT&T, and Gigapower executives shared their vision for the joint venture and how they expect to change attitudes toward open access. Adam Waltz, Managing Director of Black Rock’s Global Infrastructure Fund was excited because the company sees the US as underpenetrated when it comes to fiber broadband. Gigapower CEO Bill Hogg said, “scale will be a differentiator” beacuse the network’s scale will appeal to service providers interested in offering service over the network because “you don’t want to make [them] invest over and over with a lot of small players.” Erin Scarborough, AT&T President of Broadband and Connectivity, said the company still prefers owner’s economics where it makes sense, but added that “building out networks is really onerous – it takes time, and it takes significant capital.” However, she said the open access and joint venture approach will enable the company to expand more rapidly.

Worldwide, there is an ongoing policy and regulatory push to make very high-speed broadband available as widely as possible. Underlying the policy interventions to support higher speeds is an implicit assumption that higher speeds will enable different (and socially valuable) uses. Extensive data on usage published by the UK telecommunications regulator finds that the linkage between broadband speeds and traffic per line—allowing for demographic factors—shows that higher speed has a weak relationship to traffic. This suggests that mid-speed broadband is not a constraint on household usage (as measured by traffic), and thus the benefits of policy interventions to support higher speeds remain somewhat speculative.