‘Last yard’ or ‘10-year slog’? Here’s how BEAD is progressing in 4 states

• Four state broadband officials provided updates on how close they are to handing out money for BEAD projects
• New York is still going through its challenge process results but so far it’s identified about 95,000 locations for BEAD
• Massachusetts is “down to the last yard” when it comes to coverage

BROADBAND NATION EXPO, WASHINGTON, DC – Have we taken two steps forward or are we still standing two steps back when it comes to broadband deployments in the U.S.? That’s the question four state broadband officials answered on Thursday at Broadband Nation Expo, offering updates on how close they are to actually handing out money for BEAD projects.

The good news? Shovels could be in the ground in some states as soon as next summer. The bad news? One state official said it likely won’t be able to finish its subgrantee selection process until 2026 and dubbed BEAD a “10-year slog.”

Here’s everything you need to know about what officials from Nevada, New York, Massachusetts and North Dakota said during a keynote panel.

Nevada

According to Brian Mitchell, director of the Office of Science, Innovation and Technology at the State of Nevada’s Broadband Office, Nevada’s got around 53,907 unserved and underserved locations.

When doing its initial needs assessment, Nevada discovered that not only were there vast areas of the state that were unserved from a last mile perspective, but that it didn’t even have the middle-mile infrastructure to get to that last mile.

To that end, Nevada is using a combination of “13 or 14 different funding sources” to construct a 2,500-mile middle-mile network that will be deployed “within 10 miles of 80% of our unserved locations in the state.”

“We have counties in Nevada that are larger than 10 U.S. states [with] fewer than 5,000 people living in them,” he said. Nevada’s middle-mile network is a “gamechanger” for ISPs that have shied away from deploying in certain markets because they lacked sufficient fiber backhaul.

Nevada kicked off its subgrantee selection process in August, with today being the deadline. It plans to submit its final proposal to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) by early December and if all goes well, it hopes providers can start putting shovels into the ground sometime in summer 2025.

New York

Joshua Brietbart, SVP of ConnectALL at Empire State Development, said New York is still going through its challenge process results but so far it’s identified about 95,000 locations for BEAD.

Looking at the bigger picture, New York has about 5 million broadband-serviceable locations. While the state is down to “less than 2%” of those locations, they’re the “hardest of the hard” to reach, Breitbart noted.

When defining its BEAD project areas, New York’s goal is to have a “relatively consistent” average cost per location. These locations are fairly spread out, so the state is using feedback from service providers as well as counties and regional planning boards to determine how best to approach the projects.

The mapping process, Breitbart admitted, “hasn’t been the most fun I’ve had in my life.” 

But it’s an opportunity to collaborate with large and small providers alike and help both them and the state government “fully understand” these local markets,” he added.

Prior to BEAD, every other federal broadband program was designed to make incremental progress, he stated. “This is the first time we’ve ever gotten a mandate to get the job done,” which presents an opportunity but also a certain amount of complexity.

New York completed a round of pre-qualification for subgrantees on September 30, and expects to open BEAD applications later this fall. The state is prepping to submit its final proposal to NTIA by July 2025.

Massachusetts

Michael Baldino, director and general counsel of the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, said his state is “down to the last yard” when it comes to coverage. That translates to about 12,500 unserved locations.

While it waits for the gears of government to turn on the BEAD front, Baldino said the state decided to allocate a portion of the $175 million it received in Capital Projects Fund money from the federal government to preemptively start closing that gap via the aptly-named Gap Networks Grant Program. An initial round of awards for that program has already been made, with a second round of funding due to be distributed next month.

Of course, Baldino noted that the state doesn’t want overlap between Gap Networks projects and BEAD. So, it timed its BEAD location challenge process accordingly.

Baldino also said that the state discovered during a listening tour that broadband quality in certain communities fluctuates with tourist booms. So the challenge process was also timed to capture a snapshot of that seasonal surge and what it means for the network. He added it plans to submit the final outcomes of its challenge process to NTIA next week.

Baldino said in the meantime, Massachusetts has launched its prequalification process for providers, with the application window open until the end of October. He noted that the state has decided to do BEAD projects on a municipality by municipality basis meaning if a provider wants to build on a certain location it has to commit to 100% within that municipality. If it ends up with straggler locations, it’ll address those individually.

Assuming all goes well, Massachusetts is planning to launch its first BEAD subgrantee selection cycle in early December. Its final BEAD proposal is set to be submitted to the NTIA in July 2025.

North Dakota

North Dakota’s State Broadband Program Director Brian Newby said that like Massachusetts, his state covers nearly 99% of residents with broadband. But that doesn’t mean reaching those last few will be easy, nor does it mean that North Dakota’s plan will look anything like those of other states.

Newby said North Dakota has about 5,000 locations it needs to reach with BEAD money. But unlike Nevada and Massachusetts, it hasn’t yet decided how to set its project sizes. That’s in part because the state isn’t really sure who – if anyone – will bid.

“We don’t think people are going to bid. At least that’s the chatter in our state,” he said. That’s why North Dakota is kicking things off with an anonymous initial bidding round to see who is willing to participate and what it will take to get them to do so.

On the latter front, he noted state officials believe more entities will be incentivized to participate if the NTIA is willing to waive the 25% match requirement that is attached to BEAD funding. But of course, that will require the NTIA to clarify whether they’re willing to grant such a waiver in the first place – which that office hasn’t done yet.

Like New York and Massachusetts, North Dakota is aiming to submit its final BEAD proposal to the NTIA in the summer of 2025. But Newby warned that considering the time it has taken for the NTIA to approve earlier proposals, “we’re going to be into 2026 before we can really assign subgrantees.”

“That’s a concern,” he concluded. “This shows you that this is a 10-year slog.”

Stay tuned to Fierce Network for more coverage live from Broadband Nation Expo in Washington DC this week! Catch all our stories from the conference here.