Minnesota Gets NTIA OK to 'Move Forward' With New BEAD Plans, Top Broadband Official Says
Minnesota received the OK to "move forward" with its updated BEAD plans, state Office of Broadband Director Bree Maki said Wednesday during a Fiber Broadband Association webinar (see 2508250030). Maki said the approval came Tuesday. "If everything falls into place today ... we're hoping to go out for public comment tomorrow" to meet NTIA's Sept. 4 deadline, Maki said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Minnesota, like most states, saw a change in the number of eligible BEAD locations after NTIA's June policy notice expanding provider eligibility (see 2508190014). "We ended up at about 76,000 locations that were eligible for BEAD funding," Maki said, citing the inclusion of unlicensed fixed-wireless providers. "That certainly did impact our locations."
State broadband offices were "handed a policy crap sandwich" with NTIA's policy notice and "told to turn it into a Michelin Star feast," wrote former Kansas broadband official Jade Piros de Carvalho in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. States that were "willing to push back" on the number of broadband serviceable locations on their maps "produced plans with more scalable broadband solutions."
However, in Minnesota, the state's definition of unserved and underserved for its programs differed from BEAD's, Maki said. It's "challenging to explain that, technically, you have [broadband] by definition with the BEAD program," she said. "We're not the only state," she added: "There are other states that have been doing this for a long time, but sometimes that does feel like an extra barrier in this work because the expectations are just different."
Although Maki didn't specify how much of Minnesota's BEAD allocation would go to fiber, she noted that the state used almost all its funding from the Treasury Department's Capital Project Fund to support fiber projects. "Our programs are technology-agnostic," she said, "but you have to meet the goals and the requirements of the program on latency and speed and all those technical components."
Fiber meets those requirements "in most cases," Maki argued. When comparing the state's process for the Capital Projects Fund with BEAD, she said it has been challenging because there's "this hope that it's perfect" when "perfection is defined in many different ways," depending on what state you're in.
NTIA's June policy notice also created "a level of burnout and confusion," Maki said: "When there's so much uncertainty [and] unclearness, that creates some chaos." Some of that chaos came from changes to BEAD's environmental and workforce requirements, she noted.
"We knew when we started this, $625 million as an allocation for Minnesota was not going to finish the job based on our statutory language," she said. "It just got a little bit more challenging with the policy notice changes and the way that technology was approached."
While the policy notice affected most states, it particularly "reshuffled the deck" in the Southeast, broadband analyst James Dimmer wrote Wednesday in a blog post. Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi each favored fiber in their new plans, he noted. Calling these states the "bellwether," he said they will "prove BEAD can deliver" if they're able to hit NTIA's deadlines while scaling their workforce and "balanc[ing] technology trade-offs." If they can't, "delays here will ripple nationwide," he warned.