NTIA to Conduct Another BEAD Subgrantee Selection Round, Advocates Claim
NTIA may require states to conduct an additional round of subgrantee selections for the BEAD program, warned Christopher Mitchell, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's community broadband networks initiative. In a blog Tuesday, Mitchell said NTIA added a "new step in the BEAD process to further reduce new investment in the areas that currently only have access from satellite providers."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The new round, called the "Best and Final Offer" round, would include price caps based on models designed by CostQuest, which maintains the FCC's national broadband map, Mitchell wrote. NTIA responded Thursday with a fact-versus-myth rebuttal, saying there aren't "arbitrary price caps," and any reports "identifying a price cap are inaccurate."
However, broadband expert Doug Adams shared on Broadband.io what appeared to be price caps that would be applied to each project area. The caps were set at project areas under 65% and 85% of the area's excessive cost threshold, according to the document. Adams said the numbers weren't sent to state broadband offices and were "leaked from within the NTIA." NTIA didn't comment.
NTIA "has changed the rules again to further reduce investment in rural America" after requiring states to redo their original plans through the "Benefit of the Bargain" round, Mitchell told us in an email Thursday. "NTIA says it wants to save taxpayer dollars, but I suspect they want to redirect dollars meant for Internet access in rural America to [Commerce] Secretary [Howard] Lutnick's pet projects rather than return them to the treasury."