United States Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who will chair the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation beginning in January, recently wrote a letter to National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) administrator Alan Davidson in which Cruz briefly but harshly criticized the administration of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. In the letter dated November 21, Cruz derided the creation of what he called “a central planning bureaucracy that proceeded to impose extraneous mandates on the states and prevent the expeditious delivery of internet access to unserved communities.” He later said this federal structure and process imposes “unlawful and onerous bureaucratic obstacles.”
While Cruz’s letter to Davidson did not include the word “fiber” or make direct reference to fiber-optic technologies, the senator from Texas previously had been critical of the BEAD program’s apparent favoritism of fiber-optic broadband technologies over other alternatives.
In the November 21 letter, Cruz said, in part, “As Chairman, I will monitor this matter … Congress will review the BEAD program early next year, with specific attention to NTIA’s extreme technology bias in defining ‘priority broadband projects’ and ‘reliable broadband service’ …”
Cruz’s salvos aimed at BEAD go back more than a year. In September 2023 Cruz’s office issued what it titled a “Red Light Report,” the cover page of which included the phrase “Stop waste, fraud, and abuse in federal broadband funding.” That document took several shots at the prominent role of fiber in the BEAD program. For example, the report contended, “The Biden administration’s technology bias against non-fiber broadband will drive up costs by billions of dollars and likely deprive some communities of any broadband access at all.”
That report also took issue with the fact that wording within BEAD defines “priority projects” as those that will provide service “via end-to-end fiber-optic facilities to each end-user premises,” with some exemptions based on cost-prohibition that Cruz said are unrealistically inflated.
The 2023 report pointed to examples of cost-comparisons between some fiber-broadband projects and satellite-based broadband projects—examples in which the non-fiber options were significantly more cost-effective.
In an August 2024 letter to NTIA’s Davidson, Cruz acknowledged that since the publication of the Red Light Report, “NTIA appears to have changed course and adopted my recommendation that BEAD be more technology-neutral.” Nonetheless, within that letter Cruz requested a lengthy list of information related to BEAD.
NTIA’s director of Congressional affairs Bennett Butler responded to Cruz with a lengthy letter of his own on October 18—including a section on technology neutrality. Butler stated in that letter, “There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to broadband deployment given each state’s and territory’s unique challenges, and NTIA will ensure that the states and territories have flexibility in identifying the technical solutions that meet the needs of their communities. In many cases, the best solution will be building out high-speed Internet using fiber networks. The BEAD Program NOFO [notice of funding opportunity] recognizes that the unique characteristics of fiber meet the statutory requirement to ‘ensure that the network built by the project can easily scale speeds over time to … meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses’ and ‘support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.’
“The BEAD Program NOFO also creates room for all strategies, and NTIA expects states and territories will use a mix of technologies to connect their unserved and underserved locations. The BEAD Program NOFO allows applicants to propose to provide service over any form of Reliable Broadband Service. It also permits funding of alternative qualifying broadband technologies, such as certain satellite and unlicensed fixed service, for the locations that each state identifies as the most expensive to serve.”
As of Senator Cruz’s November 21 letter, it looks like both he and the NTIA agree states and territories are in the best position to determine for themselves which broadband technologies will satisfactorily and cost-effectively meet their residents’ needs. But that letter’s promise that “Congress will review the BEAD program early next year, with specific attention to NTIA’s extreme technology bias …” strongly implies the mix of fiber versus satellite and other technologies is still a point of significant disagreement between the sides.
We at Cabling Installation & Maintenance will follow developments related to BEAD implementation, and report them to you.
