Carr Raises Questions About BEAD Program, Federal Broadband Coordination

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr raised concerns Thursday about coordination among federal agencies regarding NTIA’s $42.5 billion broadband, equity, access and deployment program and about overbuilding through the program. “We’re going to take areas that have service today and we’re going to put federal dollars on top of private dollars rather than actually connecting people,” Carr said during an American Enterprise Institute event.

Carr criticized NTIA’s decision to treat areas served by fixed wireless over an unlicensed spectrum as unserved (see 2206090052). “It’s a problem for a lot of reasons,” he said: “The biggest miss there" is "so many parts of this country that actually have 0 Mbps.” NTIA’s notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) “put too much of a thumb on the scale for fiber” and includes provisions that “look very much look like rate regulation,” Carr said. NTIA didn’t comment.

“We’re going to run into some problems with trying to get fiber … into areas where it ends up being too costly,” Carr said, saying he has concerns about permitting delays and workforce and supply chain shortages (see 2206070050): “We got to try to take some of these dollars … to make sure we have the skilled workforce to complete these builds.”

NTIA’s NOFO placed the actual speed and quality of deployment “as the least important factor” in states’ selection process, said Duke University economics professor Michelle Connolly, which “immediately shows that the plan is not really being directed at the right things.” The inclusion of an affordability clause for middle-class families “is an induction into rate regulation for the average consumer,” she said, and language on data caps and “unjust or unreasonable network management practices” is “getting into issues of net neutrality.”

“We’re at sort of a unique point in time with our efforts to close the digital divide, which is that we’ve never had the funding to actually get the job done,” Carr said, and it “brings into sharp focus how coordinated are we, do we have the right policies in place?” The “problem” is that “a lot of these programs are really being thrown out without much guidance,” Connolly said.

Better coordination is needed on “directing the dollars where it’s needed most,” Carr said. “I’m very worried about the waste, fraud and abuse we’re going to see, the missed opportunities we’re going to see,” he said: “Frankly, it’s not too late, we can still correct some of this.” Congress “assumes that the agencies will track the spending” in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, said Technology Policy Institute Senior Fellow Sarah Oh Lam, but agencies “are limited on resources and might not” track spending without being told to do so. Grantees will also "need to know what's expected of them,” Lam said (see 2205310049).

More emphasis is needed on broadband availability for industry in addition to connecting households, said Vanderburgh County, Indiana, Commissioner Cheryl Musgrave (R). Connectivity is a “geography problem” and "none of us can predict with any great certainty exactly where population is going to go,” Musgrave said. “I hope that we can also drop the concept of overbuilding,” she said, because equipment or networks deployed with federal funding 10 years ago are likely “outdated” and “useless."