Bead Promise, Bead Letdown: Interview With Shirley Bloomfield

BEAD promise, BEAD letdown: Interview with Shirley Bloomfield

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program had immense promise to close the digital divide, Shirley Bloomfield — CEO of NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association — told Telecompetitor in a recent interview. But changes to the BEAD Program are weakening its effectiveness.

“It was a really exciting opportunity to work on the original infrastructure act — to work with the administration and Congress on the vision and an initiative to close the digital divide once and for all,” Bloomfield said, referring to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“That’s our jam at NTCA,” she said, adding that she doesn’t believe there are “any entities better suited to figuring out how to serve these un- and underserved areas” than rural broadband providers.

The biggest challenge to the promise of BEAD is the revised guidelines’ emphasis on technology neutrality.

While BEAD will bring broadband to many un- and underserved locations, Bloomfield believes the bandwidth they receive won’t be sufficient. And, there won’t be more resources to improve the connections.

Bloomfield said the revised guidelines caused some NTCA members to consider withdrawal from the BEAD Program process.

The decree that Universal Service would not be available for those new builds was a final blow for a number of companies, who basically said, ‘I might be able to cobble enough together to build part of the network, but I will never be able to sustain that network without support.’”

She noted that the 2021 IIJA and its $42.45 billion provision for the BEAD Program came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “On the heels of COVID, we knew what the consequences were for people who were not connected [to broadband]. We knew what it meant to our economy not to have those people and those businesses connected.”

Bloomfield worries that the country may face another crisis that makes people realize the importance of broadband, but by that point there will be no funds left.

In the meantime, Bloomfield said there is an initiative at the federal level to end the USDA’s ReConnect Loan and Grant Program, which she described as the only federal program requiring symmetrical 100/100 Mbps speeds. “There are efforts underway to lower that speed requirement. Why?” Lowering speed standards and leaving people with insufficient connections, she said, turns the underserved into “second-class citizens.”

The immense promise of BEAD — and the letdown she feels now — stirred Bloomfield’s “giddy” memories of the IIJA’s signing in November 2021 and “what we were going to accomplish as a country.”

Bloomfield said some NTCA members are still in the process of securing BEAD funding, “but I think there could have been a lot more. And, at the end of the day, American consumers are the ones who will miss the benefit of what could have been.”

This is the second article in a four-part series of interviews with Shirley Bloomfield, who will retire from her position with NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association in March. The other three articles are:

• AI and rural broadband
• Why Universal Service still matters (coming soon)
• The future of rural broadband (coming soon)

Telecompetitor