Doug Dawson asks – What if no one shows up for BEAD?…

Charter CFO Jessica Fisher recently announced that Charter will spend substantially less on pursuing BEAD grants than the company spent on RDOF. This is big news, because a natural assumption in some state broadband offices is that Charter would likely be a big player in the BEAD grant process. Charter has been a major participant in pursuing and winning State broadband grants funded by ARPA and the Capital Projects Fund.

Charter isn’t alone…

The real concern for State Broadband Offices is that Charter might not be the only large ISP thinking of ignoring BEAD. Most states are counting on large ISPs like Charter, Comcast, Frontier, Windstream, and Brightspeed to pursue BEAD.

After anticipating the matching fund requirement, the total awards for BEAD projects will be more than $50 billion. If the big companies don’t participate, there may not be enough financial capacity in the rest of the industry to take on the matching requirements for winning BEAD grants.

A possible result…

A lot of industry folks have predicted that a handful of big companies would win the majority of the BEAD funding. Perhaps many of them will sit it out, making it even more likely that large portions of BEAD might go to Starlink or wireless ISPs.

This has been a big question in Minnesota as MTA (MN Telecom Alliance) has already said their members are not interested.