Zero Progress Made On Biden’s $42.5 Billion Rural High Speed Internet Project
The program is reportedly mired in “climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more.”
Anyone who has watched Biden’s utter failure at his promised electrification of America will be unsurprised to learn that Team Biden’s uselessness extends to another boondoggle promised three years ago: high speed internet access for rural Americans.
Since pledging $42.5 to connect rural homes and businesses to high speed internet, not a single home or business has been connected. Not one. In three years.
The senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is blaming the Biden administration for a lack of high-speed internet projects that were approved under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, comparing the situation to the dearth of electric vehicle charging stations that were also supposed to be built with the funds.
“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans,” GOP-appointed Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on X last week. “Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
Commenters on social media noted that the funds were allocated to the states, arguing the Biden administration is not responsible for any delays. But Carr says it is the Biden administration that is holding up progress.
“There’s no question that the 2021 law put some process in place, but the Biden administration decided to layer on top of that a Byzantine additional set of hoops that states have to go through before the administration will approve them to actually get these funds and start completing the builds,” Carr told FOX Business in an interview.
. . . . Carr said the program has been mired in bureaucratic delay, and he accused the administration of “sitting on applications from states that are attempting to move forward.” He said progress is even moving in the opposite direction in many cases.
Last Friday, in a post on X, Carr said the holdup is due to a “partisan political agenda” that says includes, “climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more.”
Why has this program been such a raging failure? Team Biden, like all Democrats, has bogged themselves down with a series of DIE initiatives and requirements, environmental regulations and red tape, and their insistence on attempting to control the states (and the market) from DC.
Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records to install broadband equipment.
The Commerce Department, which is distributing the funds under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, is also attempting to regulate consumer rates, lawmakers say. This puts them at odds with internet providers and congressional Republicans, who say the law prohibits such regulation.
The slow pace of funding allocation and compliance will push the project start dates for modernizing rural internet access to 2025 and 2026, according to a timeline officials outlined in a House budget hearing.
Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment.
I sincerely doubt Democrats will have connected — or allowed Republicans to connect — a single home by 2030.
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Not enough black trans bipolar schizophrenic workers I guess
With criminal records, don’t forget.
eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records.
None of this article has anything whatsoever to do with black trans bipolar schizophrenic workers. Are you insane?
It was sarcasm, dickweed. Are you insane?
She is kind of insane, but in this instance she’s completely correct.
You say you live in an area that needs this and is mostly white; care to explain how that matters, and how it refutes gonzo’s claim? In fact it demonstrates her point exactly: in your area, where eligible DIE hires are scarce on the ground, they can’t proceed until they scare some up. Including people with criminal records to come into people’s houses to install equipment. That seems like a wonderful idea that couldn’t possibly go wrong.
l live in rural America in the Midwest, which is mostly white, and there is a real problem of providing fast Internet to the people who live here. For you to say that this is about black trans bipolar schizophrenic workers just shows how delusional you are. Grow up.
“Since pledging $42.5 to connect rural homes and businesses to high speed internet, not a single home or business has been connected. Not one. In three years.”
Both news stories point to bureaucratic requirements, not related, as largely contributory, including DEI that permeates the process. 3 YEARS!
Since you seem so hot and bothered, why not enlighten as to what it is really about, and remove any question that it’s actually personal anger and need to disparagement, unprovoked. Hard to understand the bitterness, unless one is a black trans bipolar schizophrenic worker.
Yeah guys. Grow up and let them just waste tens of billions of dollars not doing the slightest thing to actually solve the thing you claim is such a problem.
IF it were actually such an extreme problem that the government has to fix, they could have just hired Musk to do it and I guarantee he would already have hooked up a good portion of them for a fraction of the cost.
Come on, man. The Biden administration has allocated so much humyn-power toward building charging stations for EVs. You can’t expect the federal government to have had all of that success building so many charging stations AND install high speed internet service at the same time? It’s a lot to ask, don’t you think?
I think I saw that they could have simply bought Starlink antennas for 145 million people with the money allocated.
But hooking those up doesn’t require a horde of workers in every state, and might end up causing someone, somewhere, to become independent.
Your first idiotic post wasn’t dumb enough, so you decided to double down.
What part of “her post was sarcasm” are you not getting, you buffoon?
You clearly can’t read, can’t decipher the meaning of a post, can’t comprehend simple terms, can’t be bothered to pay attention…. are you running in the Democrat primary?
Why are you here?
“Why are you here?”
Simple. JR is here to tell us Trump allowed trannies into the Miss Universe/America whatever pageant, that he had sex with a porn star, and other issues that have nothing to do with the price of tea in Outer Buttfuck Nowhere.
Oh, and you are a racist and a keyboard warrior.
Otherwise, he makes flaccid remarks similar to the above.
On a good note, I haven’t seen his alter ego BartE for a while.
Require cable companies to offer internet-only service without the crap bundling.
That “crap bundling” got me a $225 rebate this year from my telephone cooperative. That’s about 2 and a half months’ worth of phone, long distance and high-speed internet, free, or the equivalent of roughly reducing my monthly bill to about $65. Personally, I consider that a bargain.
Better yet require these monopoly providers to divy up the low population density but large geographic rural areas among themselves. Then require every new line run and 70% of new hook ups to come from the rural areas.
That’s really the only way to get it done. Make them serve the likely money losing areas or risk losing their monopoly on the high profit dense population areas. That or just get out of the way and make direct subsidies for Satellite providers like ViaSat and Starlink to serve those areas.
I am literally on the county line and my neighbor (1/2 a mile + away) and I are the last two homes served by the local electric co-op. When power outages occur and y’all see 99.99% of service restored we and others like us are the .01% still without power. Not complaining, we chose to come out here and that’s one negative among many more positive aspects of rural life. It’s a matter of priorities and until the financial or regulatory incentives exist to make it in these Internet providers direct financial interest to get service to rural customers then we ain’t getting high speed broadband options as cities do.
Electric-wise, my wife and I are in the same boat as you. Which is why I just pulled the trigger on a solar setup for us out here. I will NOT be selling anything back to “the grid” unless my batteries are completely charged. And there is a cut-off that automagically kills the grid connection once the batteries are at <100%. Thereby keeping any stored juice for our usage. And no, it's not a lease or other program (although I do get tax credits on them). We're paying for this ourselves, so we aren't required to sell anything back to the county co-op.
46 panels, 3 20kwh batteries, all for $50k. With installation. And they run the lines to my outbuildings and cover the installation. Tax credits will cover almost 50% of it. The loan to cover the rest is for 25 years, but I'll double or triple the principle and have it paid off waaaaayyyy before that (no penalty).
Interestingly enough, my internet (satellite) service gives me 100/10 Mbps for the "low" price of $130/mo. after taxes. But it's a commercial account rather than residential and comes with a 4-hour SLA. My nearest neighbors benefit because IF something goes out, when they call, they get told it'll be fixed when it's fixed. But when I or my wife call, it's "we'll have someone on this right away" and it's fixed in less than 4 hours (unless it's an upstream provider issue).
My house is 100% solar because our REC would have charged more to bring power to my property than it cost to put in my system. I went with LFP batteries and a propane generator back up for the brief periods when we can’t collect enough from the roof. Our internet is Starlink and it’s faster and more reliable than the internet at my office, in town.
Yeah. I use ViaSat and have no problems. No latency and no outage unless it is a very heavy rain so maybe it happens five times a year. I ain’t gaming or producing and uploading content so I don’t need that much bandwidth.
Agree on the alternatives to or supplement to the grid. There are plenty of locations where point of use solar with battery system and a generator makes sense. Especially if one considers factors beyond the financial cost.
What brand did you use? I understand that Tesla has a big backlog for their installation of batteries/panels. I am considering a similar set up myself and would appreciate any advice from your experience.
Of course it’s a failure. Last I heard, they had denied StarLink’s request to participate in the program. If the true goal was to provide high speed service to underserved areas, the easy answer would be to subsidize StarLink service (and the other LOE constellation services when they come online).
When I started up my rural netification company, I refused to engage in any government paperwork whatsoever, just because I knew it would eventually turn out like this.
Then I learned that unless I reported to the FCC what territories I was serving, there was an excellent chance that a nearby competitor would file for just this type of federal grant to serve that “unserved” territory where I had already installed infrastructure, meaning the government would be paying someone to compete with me on my own equipment. In other words, I needed to report simply to post my service area “no trespassing.” So I did the bare minimum, but I refused all enticements to accept grants or involve myself in other incentive programs that would complicate my life by inextricably engaging me with the fedguv.
The whole federal incentive program was a stupid idea anyway. It was like paying prospectors to travel to California in 1848. If you paid them to go to the Sacramento Valley, you were wasting your money, because there was gold there and they would have gone on their own. If you paid them to go anywhere else, you were still wasting your money, because there was no gold there.
In 2007, when I started, the rural wireless internet business was gold-rush open. If you could cop a fat source of bandwidth, you could do everything else needed to distribute it and Make Money Now. Today, all the easy markets have been snarfed up, and the remaining unserved markets are big ranches, forests, desert and mountain outposts, and other places where there either isn’t enough density, or there is nothing but obstructed terrain, to serve a relative handful of residents. The sort of places that you will never turn a profit from, no matter how much the fedguv grants you upfront for infrastructure.
So I’m not surprised at all to hear the program is a total failure. Biden may as well be bribing Floridians to buy tire chains.
When I switched from Comcast to Verizon I had to have a technician come in my abode to perform technical stuff. I think I had a “justice-impacted” technician. I felt rather anxious and had a hard time understanding him but he did a good job.
In the future, meet them at your door with a gun on your hip. Holstered of course. And follow them asking them questions about what they’re installing, doing, etc. Turn the tables and make them the nervous ones.
It always worked for me. Even when I was living in apartments in the city.
And the truly competent ones won’t mind the questions. And (depending on your area – blue vs red) around here few service folks would blink at someone carrying in their home or on their property.
Can we just force Stephanie Kelton to only get her saalry? No money from books or speeches. Only investment in index funds S&P 500 and Fortune 100. Then make her pay thee times extra the price increase sinc 2020?
I don’t see how you could call this a failure. They’re accomplishing their primary goal of funneling billions of dollars into employing friendly bureaucrats.
Gotta find govt employment for all these excess over credentialed college grads with questionable degree choices. Even coffee shops laying off baristas.
Too busy building EV charging stations.
Why would they actually help rural areas get high speed internet? They hate the people that live out in the rural areas. So I’d say everything is going according to plan.
We need to slow down the food shipments to town…..to remind the urbanites that they eat on the labor of those they hate.
If you want cheap symmetric gigabit broadband rural areas are often much better than urban ones. The urban areas have old decrepit infrastructure, and offering such service would require ripping it all out and replacing it, which providers like Comcast refuse to do, in part because they often have no competition. Only greenfield projects get fiber from Comcast or AT&T. The rural areas get brand new fiber infrastructure, often from smaller companies, which is much cheaper despite having fewer subscribers to pay for it.
allll b/c of the monopoly granted to them by the government
if it was a free market then the rural areas would be of interest >>$$$
but why do it when you can wait until the government writes the “private” companies a big fat tax funded check
even 42$ million/billion
isnt enough
As I explained above, not true. There is no government monopoly involved. The rural areas where there are enough customers that a profit can be made typically already have free-market service from small, local companies, both wireless and wired. It can be a profitable business. The areas that remain, remain precisely because the free market knows they would be a financial loss. The fedguv throwing money down that hole won’t change that. All they can do is keep the small operator from losing money on network installation. Once installation is achieved, the grant can’t do squat about lack of recurring revenue, and you eventually go broke.
I assume lack of progress doesn’t include people making lots of money from this producing nothing?
Dementia Joe’s entire 4 year term has been trillion dollar boondoggle.
Years ago it used to be the $500 toilet seats. I never imagined that their solution would be to spend money and build no toilet seats.
You lack imagination. All the way back to FDR, the government was paying farmers not to plant crops.
Rural areas can already use hughes net dish. It doesn’t work during bad weather. But its viable alternative.
Hughes, or any of the geostationary satellite services, are what you sign up for if your ONLY alternative is dialup. Which was true of my area in 2005. It’s a bloody awful service, slow as a dog and limited, and their rates and T&C are extortionary. Their customer service is incredibly incompetent, and I say this as a customer of theirs before I was their competitor.
On the other hand, Starlink broke the physics barrier of geostationary delay and they are an extremely viable service, as long as the price tag doesn’t stymie you.
Really, the past 20 years proved that wireless comm is the answer to underserved areas, and wireless satellite comm like Starlink is the answer to even lower-density underserved areas. If it weren’t for the chasm between the average income in such areas and the price of Starlink, Musk would be eating everybody’s lunch.
Looks like Biden is all talk, no action. Kinda like DJT’s last term.
interesting how sooo many here just automatically accept government run and dont connect that thats why they are not getting service
the companies now wait for the gov to give them the “right” incentive
It’s like universities, manufacturers of digital TV converters, solar panel producers, and every other subsidized activity — their price to the consumer simply rises to absorb the amount of the government subsidy or rebate.
Donald Trump’s last term WAS Dementia Joe’s first term due to voter fraud. They are so afraid of us not letting them steal another election they conspired with their loyal liberal prosecutors who have a Gorilla Grip on the courts to persecute DJT in the hope that it will discourage voters. I am so encouraged to change government that I am reading up on France’s Bastille Day and taking appropriate actions….. so GFY you pathetic never trumper.
interesting how sooo many here just automatically accept government run and dont connect that thats why they are not getting service
the companies now wait for the gov to give them the “right” incentive
But did joe get his 10%?
You can be sure he did.
This is exactly what Newsom does at the state level. Billions of dollars in grant money are burned in project planning, environmental impact and other reports, lawyer fees, fake “ground breaking” photo op ceremonies, and then unions get their payola contracts.
Parkinson’s law can refer to several observations, published in 1955 by C. Northcote Parkinson:
1.) “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,”
2.) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals,”
3.) “Officials make work for each other.”
*He noted that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work to be done”.
Yep. Bureaucracy grows ever larger with the individuals within the bureaucracy becoming focused upon:
1. Expanding their reach to justify more personnel
2. Seeking enhanced powers to make their tasks easier often in ways that are Constitutionally/legally questionable
3. Seeking exemptions to their actions from existing laws or Constitutional protections
In sum bureaucracy wants to make it easier to complete their tasks using intrusive/sketchy means, hire more bureaucrats to lessen the individual work load and expand their list of tasks to secure a future promotion as a supervisor.
They also proceed to require makework reports of one another, increasing the number of bureaucrats needed to perform that “work.”
Such a waste of money. 5G wireless networks operated by the big three U.S. wireless providers, and, whose geographic scope is expanding, daily, already achieve very nearly the same speeds as wired high-speed Internet; fast enough to watch high-definition video, stream music, download large files and do anything else that a rural, geographically remote Internet user would demand.
As per usual, the vile and stupid Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks excel at pissing away money in the most foolish, profligate and ill-conceived manner, possible.
And some of those rural users are outside 5G wireless range.
Like the vast majority of southwest Texas.
You can drive from Uvalde to Van Horn with zero cell service along the entire trip, excepting small towns like DelRey, where you will pick up a local signal for a couple minutes, then dead again.
And that’s not “5G cell service,” that’s ANY cell service.
There’s no helping it. Biden became bored halfway through having “The Little Red Caboose” read to him so no more choo-choo train.
Well, I’m not convinced that “government-run networks” is a “good thing” in the first place. That’s putting the fox in charge of the henhouse – or the inmates in charge of the asylum. Seems to me either metaphor works.
Or even putting the inmates in charge of the hen house.
That one might be even more appropriate with this administration.
I am right in the thick of this problem, and am about to try to join the Governor’s task force on rural internet connectivity. For a dozen years I have been working this issue, and can confirm that there is complexity and the sort of government-created idiocy that is hard to even imagine.
For more than a decade, the whole government-stupidity-complex looked at the problem in a way only government can. If a *single* household in your census district “had access to high-speed internet”, your house was *deemed* to have access too. Never mind that there are no wires, fibers, or point-to-point radio facilities. Reality does not matter.
Mind you I am in the county seat, with a 25000 student university here. From my neighbor’s porch I can see the backup (full capacity fiber trunk) of the main west-coast north-south fiber link for the US. We have 180K DSL theoretically available, but the truth is nobody on my street even has telephone service, as if it was 1924, not 2024.
After 12 years of arguments, the state finally has a map that links the concepts of addresses, tax lots, residences, utility interties and other details. The map includes roads, so now it is possible to do things like propose work based on distance and population density. The grant proposal process is *hard* and does have a substantial DEI component.
So after a dozen years of work on my part, the county agrees with the assessment of the people that live on the street — none of us have high-speed internet. It seems like somebody should pay me a few million dollars for hard work resulting in nothing getting done.
As for 5G connectivity, do not hold your breath. 5G is a radio-centric solution, a digital packet radio. It relies on the physical geography of the tower network and radio antenna propagation. In particular, in order to communicate one must be in one of the active lobes of the radio signal. Although I could stand in my driveway and put bullet holes in the 5G antenna that is on the peak, it is not so simple to have reliable service from Verizon because we are physically below the primary and secondary lobes of the 5G radio waves.
Hughes.net is another form of insanity. Satellite service is like physical telephone service in that the infrastructure has a certain number of slots, and when the satellite is full, there is zero connectivity. There are no Hughes slots available here, so the speed is zero. When there were slots, speed is limited by what was happening in the other circuits on the satellite, and the speed was never fast. In fact, the satellites and the communication protocol in use were designed for fewer larger packets. Today’s “chatty” HTML-over-TCP internet usage is a nightmare of structural overhead per delivered byte. It is essentially the worst usage of satellite data relay possible.
When I was paying for it a few years ago, we would get like 45K effective throughput. Like a modem from 1992.
And what’s even weirder is when you realize you live so far out that your house IS its own census block. True story.
I beg to differ. We live in rural ND and now have fiber optic internet where before we had an antennae with wireless coming from 7 miles away. Now we not only have fiber optic from one company but another line from a competitor is also available. Maybe we are just lucky.
I live in West Central Illinois and surrounded by alot of farm land. Been using Nextlink (nextlinkinternet.com) for the last 3 years before they purchased the company I was using since 2007. Getting 400mb download/40mb upload speeds reliably for $119 a month. A dish is on top of my house that points to cell tower about 5 miles into town. They specialize is serving the rural communities of America. From North to South in the central part of the US.
Onondaga County, NY got its rural areas connected using American Rescue Plan money in a contract with Verizon FIOS.
https://www.waer.org/news/2022-11-16/verizon-selected-to-close-remaining-broadband-internet-service-gaps-in-onondaga-county
I know people who just got connected.
I suspect like space access, after a lot of Federal money gets spent rural internet will get provided by Musk (Starlink.)
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