As electric cooperatives descend upon Washington, DC, this week for their fifth-annual Broadband Leadership Summit, they bring with them a number of policy priorities and concerns. Among those is their growing distress at the direction of the federal government’s $42 billion BEAD program.
“Quite frankly, some decisions have been made in the BEAD program that we are not happy with,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), during a press conference last week ahead of the summit. NRECA represents the interests of the country’s electric co-ops, of which roughly 200 offer retail broadband service in the US.
There were at least two issues for the electric coops: fiber…
“We were pretty disappointed that the preference for fiber was removed. We think that shifts the program’s focus from what would be more of a proven, durable, scalable broadband technology. So we were not in favor of that decision,” added Matheson. The Trump administration stripped BEAD of its fiber preference last June, forcing states to re-do their bidding processes to instead award the lowest-cost bidders.
And pole attachment rules for electric coops…
In addition to BEAD losing its fiber preference, co-ops are also worried about ever-changing rules for the federal broadband program that make it harder for them to participate: “It adds to confusion, it adds to delay, it adds to cost. That’s been disappointing,” said NRECA’s Matheson.
One change of particular concern to electric cooperatives is the NTIA’s decision to impose FCC pole attachment rules on co-ops participating in the BEAD program, despite co-ops typically being exempt from federal pole attachment regulations. The FCC rules cap the rates pole owners may impose and set time limits on processing pole attachment applications. The regulation applies across the service provider’s entire footprint, not just within the BEAD-funded area.