NTIA Middle-Mile Program Likely to Be More Competitive than BEAD: Panel

States, local communities and industry should begin having conversations now about the type of partnerships needed once NTIA’s broadband, equity, access and deployment program and middle-mile broadband infrastructure program funding become available, panelists said during a Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition webinar Friday. Panelists encouraged anchor institutions to start organizing and identifying their communities' needs as funding from both programs may not reach everyone.

“We're going to have to think creatively for community anchors to be able to achieve funding” because anchor institutions are listed in NTIA’s BEAD notice of funding opportunity under the third and lowest level of priority, said Claude Aiken, Nextlink chief strategy and legal officer: “I don’t anticipate there being much money left at all for that bucket.” Stakeholders “need to get prepared” and understand what technologies “may be in play in any given state,” Aiken said.

NTIA’s middle-mile program will likely be “incredibly competitive” given the limited funding and be available sooner than BEAD funding, Aiken said. Applicants that can match at least 51% of the cost of a project will put themselves in “a pretty good place relative to somebody who may only have the minimum 30%,” he said.

The challenge is deciding whether to attempt to meet everyone’s needs or “a smaller community’s needs far and above what they actually need,” Aiken said, because “we’re talking about a limited pot of funding and a lot of need that’s out there.” The $1 billion program is “not going to go very far to achieve a lot of the goals that we want to achieve,” he said, so “if you're not actively thinking about and talking about and coordinating with your community … you very well may miss out.”

States need to be made aware of any infrastructure challenges at the local level where existing infrastructure may not be reliable when scoring and ranking BEAD funding requests, said Detroit Digital Inclusion Director Joshua Edmonds. “I really hope that most communities look at this as a group project” because “we’re all going to be accountable for how this money is spent,” Edmonds said. The timeline of BEAD and middle-mile funding becoming available “works because it has to for us,” he said, but “it’s not going to stop us from going after the other work” needed to connect communities.

Among the potential challenges for the BEAD program is that “several million locations that are likely and currently served” by unlicensed fixed wireless are considered unserved and eligible for funding, Aiken said. “This is an incredibly complex program,” he said, and states will need to meet “a lot of requirements.” Nextlink is “still looking very closely at the programs” before deciding whether to participate, Aiken said, noting the buy American requirement "certainly could be a concern" for providers as they consider their supply chain.

Another challenge is that funding through the BEAD program may not be available until 2024 or 2025, Aiken said. It’s in part due to the “very laudable goal of making sure that we get the maps right,” he said, “which is why you see so many bites at the apple for mapping and for challenges here.”

“As we look at the challenge process that will be outlined” in the BEAD program regarding broadband availability maps, “we want to make sure that Detroiters are actually engaged here in a way that they participate at a degree that we determine to be statistically significant,” Edmonds said: “I want to make the state … make the toughest funding decision to tell us no” if the city won't receive the funding it seeks.