The Biden administration today unveiled a giant round of federal grants with an equally outsized goal: get a broadband connection to everybody in the United States by 2030.
The $42.45 billion in allocations span all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, as well as American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, drawing on funding included in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever,” President Biden said at a White House event Monday. “We’re going to be able to connect every person in America to reliable high-speed Internet by 2030.”
The formula used to determine these Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants emphasizes the number of unconnected locations that would be expensive to connect. On that metric, Texas comes out far ahead, qualifying for more than $3.31 billion in BEAD funding. California is second, with $1.86 billion.
The other states to exceed a billion each are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. (Check out the full breakdown on InternetforAll.gov.)
At the White House event, Vice President Kamala Harris said 24 million people in the US lack broadband, either because it’s not available or because they can’t afford it. “Let us agree that in the 21st century in America, high-speed internet is not a luxury. It is a necessity,” she said.
BEAD, run by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, represents the federal government’s boldest attempt to fill in those gaps in broadband-availability maps.
The Biden administration has also launched separate programs to address affordability concerns, such as the Affordable Connectivity Program to provide $30 monthly vouchers for broadband, which yields free connectivity from internet providers that sign onto a White House initiative to provide 100Mbps connectivity for $30 a month.
BEAD recipients now have to document how they will spend those grants, with a 180-day window to submit their first proposals opening July 1. The infrastructure law and the BEAD program don’t specify a particular form of connectivity, but NTIA head Alan Davidson said last summer that the administration supported a fiber-first approach to broadband buildout that would fall back to fixed wireless and low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband in more remote locations.