ISPs' BEAD Participation Seen as Varying Notably State by State

Nevada has heard consistently from ISPs that the structure and size of project areas will determine their level of BEAD participation, said Brian Mitchell, Nevada's broadband director. The state has 1,042 project areas dividing up nearly 54,000 unserved and underserved locations and community anchor institutions. Some project areas incorporate thousands of locations, others only one. An array of very large and small providers have gone through the prequalification process, Mitchell said, submitting applications for everything from fixed wireless to end-to-end fiber. Subgrantees' BEAD applications were due Thursday. There are going to be project areas where fiber won’t make sense “even if we had unlimited money,” he said.

North Dakota, with 99% of the state covered and 5,000 unserved or underserved locations, is concerned about low bidder participation, said Brian Newby, North Dakota Information Technology state broadband program director. He said the state expects it will negotiate with providers to get some unserved and underserved areas covered. Newby said NTIA must offer greater clarity around its matching funds waiver criteria.

Massachusetts Broadband Institute Director Michael Baldino said Comcast, Charter and Verizon dominated participation in the state’s Capital Projects Fund, while a previous rural broadband effort using state bond funds saw municipal networks, smaller providers as well as the majors participate. Baldino said it’s too early in the BEAD process to judge how democratic participation will be in Massachusetts.

Joshua Breitbart, senior vice president of Empire State Development’s ConnectALL program, said New York has “good participation” in the prequalification phase across provider size and the technologies they will use. Workforce, permitting and supply chain issues could slow BEAD, said NTIA Senior Policy Adviser Will Arbuckle. He said Commerce and NTIA are “incredibly aware and focused” on the potential challenge permitting poses. NTIA, he said, plans next week to issue the first iteration of a list of companies that have self-certified that they make certain equipment in the U.S. State broadband offices and ISPs could use that list to certify compliance with BEAD’s buy-American requirement. Arbuckle said Commerce has a variety of tools it has used in the past for ensuring compliance with requirements, such as spot visits or audits, and the agency “will look at the basket of options” when it comes to policing buy-American requirement compliance.

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) CEO Dave Stehlin said while the construction industry is aging, there also is a growing deficit of workers skilled in network-related trades, from fiber splicing to engineering design. He said Broadband Nation is undertaking a social-media-focused national brand campaign emphasizing careers with the intent of driving people to state-by-state listings of open jobs. In addition, it will raise awareness of community colleges and for-profit educational institutions providing related training. "We definitely need to have a national imperative about this," he said.

Parties from TIA to the Government Accountability Office have identified workforce issues as a challenge to implementation for several years, said Kathryn de Wit, Pew Charitable Trusts project director-broadband access initiative. That includes lack of proper credentialing and inconsistent credentialing across the field, along with lack of alignment between industry needs and available training, she said. There also is sizable competition for workers from other industries like energy, she said. Workforce development needs to be a national imperative, she said. State broadband offices often are in the midst of a learning curve regarding workforce development, she said.

Every agency that was a recipient of infrastructure funding is grappling with the challenge of where workers will come from, said Accenture Senior Adviser Kevin Gallagher. States not as far along in the BEAD process will face particularly fierce competition for workers when they get to the start of construction, Gallagher said. States leaving workforce development issues solely to the ISPs are doing so "at their peril," he said. While NTIA is under scrutiny for the pace of BEAD's rollout, the focus inevitably will turn to the states and their implementation, and lack of workers won't be seen as a good excuse, he said.

“Gen Z is not trying to get into telecom right now,” SCTE CEO Maria Popo. To attract people telecom fields, SCTE is building a broadband classification system of jobs and skill sets as a foundation for a career path tool that shows career opportunities based on particular skills, she said.

Asked about whether there’s a need for a national certification program for various broadband skills, Gallagher said such a certification would give employers some confidence that prospective employees have particular skills, but historically, credentials have sometimes been used to exclude people from job opportunities.

Expo Notebook

NTIA has approved 53 of the 56 state and territory BEAD initial proposals, though 51 have been announced, Arbuckle said. The expectation, he said, is states now in the subgrantee process, including Louisiana and West Virginia, will start BEAD construction in 2025.

Multiple speakers said fiber can't serve as the be-all, end-all option for rural connectivity. “We have had this fiber vision too long,” said consultant and former FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly. BEAD’s fiber focus is too expensive, he added, jeopardizing the goal of states providing universal connectivity. Echoed Vini Santos, Ciena solutions marketing senior adviser-broadband and 5G, “We cannot be short-sighted [that] fiber will solve everything.” Push fiber as far as it's feasible, especially because it can serve as backhaul for alternatives such as fixed wireless and satellite broadband. But fiber to end users isn't necessary in every case, he said.

Given the trend of rising home construction in rural areas, broadband network buildouts need to be future-proofed accordingly, said John Chamberlain, vice president-technology, CommScope. Offering broadband access in rural areas will incentivize people to move there, he said. While a rural road might have five homes per mile today, ISPs must anticipate serving 20 homes in that mile.