Doug Dawson observes in his blog, POTs and PANs…

It was originally thought that States would be on significantly different schedules for BEAD. However, the NTIA implemented a 365-day shot clock that requires States to make grant awards within a year after getting approval of a State’s Volume II BEAD rules. This means that within a six to nine month window, all BEAD grant projects are going to get rolling at the same time.

I’ve always anticipated that there will be bottlenecks created by the large volume of BEAD grants, but having all of the grants launched within a narrow time window will aggrevate the issue. Consider a big electric company like Duke Energy that operates in multiple states in the Southeast. The company is going to be asked to deal with a lot of BEAD projects at the same time. All of the regulatory rules in the world are not going to help the inevitable bottleneck that a large utility will face in 2025 when multiple ISPs and projects try to get a response from the legal teams and engineers at a utility at the same time. Most States are going to throw extra money at trying to overcome the make-ready bottlenecks as Virginia has done.

Make-ready is only one of the issues that is going to cause delays. I’ve written before about the issues involved in permitting, acquiring rights-of-way and easements, and locating underground utilities that can all bog down fiber projects before they even get started.

Most State Broadband Offices have already indicated that they are going to pressure ISPs to sign contracts to complete projects in two, three, or four years, depending on the size of a project. ISPs will likely have to agree to these timelines, even when they know that delays may make it impossible to meet such a promise.

The good news is there is a longer time frame until BEAD dollars expire, but I fully expect in a few years to see more articles like the one in the Cardinal News wondering why it’s taking so long to build the promised broadband networks.