Speeding BEAD Summit: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO
In The News Piece in Broadband Breakfast
June 12, 2025
Jessica Dine, policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute and its Wireless Future Program, participated as a panelist during Broadband Breakfast’s Speeding BEAD Summit on June 12, joining the the third panel, “Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO,” for an informative discussion around the implications that the policy notice released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on June 6 could have for internet users across the country.
Select Highlights
Dine on how the new BEAD policy notice has stripped the program guidelines of crucial nuance:
The federal government has the requirement to ensure that the programs it runs are generally in alignment with other policy objectives of the United States. I’m sympathetic to the idea of streamlining [the BEAD program] and ensuring that broadband is front and center, but this was an unnecessarily messy way to do that—a lot of nuance was stripped out of the guidelines, and I am worried that we are not allowing for a process that is not as comprehensive as it otherwise might have been.
Dine on whether the new guidelines will truly help the U.S. achieve the “Benefit of the Bargain” in BEAD:
The purported aim of [the BEAD program] is to get the most bang for our buck. One way to do that is to see a return on investment. And if, as of right now, there is no real policy to encourage adoption, there’s not any real policy to encourage affordability… as of right now, we’re abandoning that route altogether. And you can do as much deployment as you want, but if there isn’t focus on adoption and affordability, we will see no return on investment for any of the networks we build.
Dine on the inherent bias of the purportedly “technology neutral” BEAD policy notice:
I don’t think this notice is tech neutral. It’s biased towards technologies from providers that can eat the costs of having to redo the [application] process, providers that are able to apply everywhere simultaneously, and providers that can request lower upfront amounts of BEAD funding.