The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa (also referred to as Ojibwe) has officially begun construction on a foundational fiber optic broadband expansion project in northern Minnesota that is poised to bridge the digital divide for thousands of Tribal residents.

The ambitious undertaking is supported by a significant $20 million grant awarded under the 2021 Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, marking a major step forward in modernizing infrastructure for the sovereign nation.

The massive project aims to overhaul the existing connectivity landscape across the Bois Forte Reservation.

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Once completed, the new network will deliver a high-speed, future-proof up to 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber-to-the-home network to over 2,097 largely-underserved Native American households, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

Many Tribal nations were skipped over by past fiber deployments either due to outright hostility to Tribal interests, or a disinterest in the work required to align for-profit deployments with the needs and wishes of what is often multiple Tribal territories.

For Bois Forte, this new fiber network is expected to have a transformative impact across several key sectors, fundamentally improving community access to vital services:

Close to a 1,000 broadband-minded registrants attended yesterday’s listening session on how to spend an estimated $21 billion in “non-deployment” funds states should have at their disposal from the federal BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment) program.

Hosted by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA), the Commerce Department agency administering the program, the online listening session featured about 50 selected speakers. Most of those who spoke advocated using the money to tackle the array of non-infrastructure barriers to expand broadband (affordability, device distribution, and digital skills programs) – made all the more urgent in light of the Trump administration’s sudden “termination” of the Digital Equity Act last year.

Though it runs counter to the bipartisan infrastructure law that established the program, a handful of speakers actually suggested the funds simply be returned to the U.S. Treasury, presumably to “save taxpayer dollars.”

One speaker even tried to make the case that money Congress explicitly intended to address the nation’s massive digital divide should instead be given to Air Traffic Controllers.

Elon Musk’s Starlink is making new demands of states with an eye on eroding accountability and oversight, reheating concerns about whether spending big money on the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network is the best possible use of taxpayer resources.

Last year, the Trump administration made revisions to NTIA rules surrounding the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD) program, demanding that states de-prioritize fiber and dole out significantly more money to LEO satellite providers – a move broadly seen as a personal gift to one of the President’s biggest financial donors.

This subsidy reward, slated to be at least $733 million to start, is money that in some cases is being redirected away from higher-capacity, more affordable local options like open access community-owned fiber networks.

The NTIA changes introduced significant new delays in a program already rife with them. The Trump administration’s threat to withhold grant awards from states that focus on affordability – and the high consumer costs, environmental impact, and capacity constraints of the LEO network – risks undermining BEAD’s promise of faster, more affordable access.

Standoff Orbits 'LEO participation' 

Last week, Broadband.io and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society obtained a copy of a letter Starlink parent company SpaceX sent to individual states, demanding freedom from state oversight and monitoring should they bungle installs or fail to deliver acceptable bandwidth.

Despite a memo issued by the NTIA last summer that sought to discourage states from passing affordable broadband legislation similar to New York State’s Affordable Broadband Act, two dozen state lawmakers in Maryland have signed on to the Broadband Opportunity and Fairness Act, state legislation that seeks to address the single biggest barrier to Internet access anywhere: affordability.

HB-382, if passed, would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in Maryland to offer low-cost Internet service plans to eligible low-income households.

Introduced by Delegate Kris Fair (D-3A, Frederick Co.), the bill now has 25 co-sponsors and is slated for a Feb. 12 legislative hearing before the House Economic Matters Committee. Companion legislation has yet to be filed in the Senate, though Delegate Fair’s office says they are in discussions with state Senators about advancing a bill through that chamber as well.

Stepping Up and 'Doing Something'

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced a dramatic expansion of the state’s Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP), resulting in an additional $36 million cash infusion for the growing number of creative, community-owned and operated fiber expansion projects in the state.

According to a state announcement, the existing MIP program, launched in early 2024, has already funded more than $268 million in assorted open access fiber projects across the state. A state broadband office dashboard tracks all active municipal projects funded to date.

That includes efforts like the growing open access municipal fiber network in Dryden, New York, which has been steadily delivering affordable next-gen fiber to the long-underserved rural communities of Dryden and nearby Caroline (population 3,321).

New York State officials say the $268 million in MIP grant funding has funded active projects across 24 New York counties, resulting in more than 2,300 miles of new fiber optic infrastructure and 68 new wireless hubs serving more than 96,000 homes and businesses. Most of this funding was made possible by the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

The MIP program is part of New York state’s billion dollar ConnectALL Initiative, and was specifically designed to support municipal broadband projects proven to be a viable, and increasingly popular, way to bring affordable, high-quality Internet service to long-neglected U.S. communities.

In the last two months of the Biden administration, nearly $500 million in grants were announced to support Tribal broadband projects. From Alaska to Virginia, 55 Tribal nations were poised to improve Internet access and advance digital sovereignty in their communities.

As President Trump took office, more than a hundred applicants still awaited word on their proposals, with nearly $500 million still available in the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP).

Then, silence. Ten months of silence.

In early November, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) sent a letter to NTIA officials asking about the TBCP. The program was established with two appropriations totaling nearly $3 billion. The first round of TBCP grants rolled out throughout 2022 and 2023, totalling nearly $100 million in use and adoption funding and over $1.7 billion in planning or infrastructure funding.

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The $500 million announced at the end of the Biden administration was part of round two of the program, for which applications were due in March 2024. With about $1 billion available, only about half of the funding in round two had been allocated.

What was happening, the Senators asked, with the rest of that funding? There were other questions too.

*The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Jake Neenan was originally published here.

The Commerce Department has approved 18 final spending plans under its $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. One state, Louisiana, had access to its funding, according to the agency.

Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Tuesday morning that plans had been approved from 15 states:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wyoming – and three territories – American Samoa, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.

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NTIA approval is one of the last steps before states and territories can start signing contracts and projects can get underway. Louisiana had gone through the remaining reviews and had access to its BEAD deployment funding Tuesday, NTIA said.

The agency said it would post more information on the approved final proposals on their BEAD website. The documents themselves weren’t online Tuesday morning.

It’s not clear to what extent the approved plans differ from the preliminary grant awards states posted in recent months. A major goal of the NTIA when it updated the program’s rules in June was to push deployment spending down, and as part of the approval process states in some cases had to revise tentative awards the agency considered too expensive.

NTIA said the approved states and territories came in $6 billion under budget relative to their BEAD allocations.

At the New Mexico Infrastructure Finance Conference last week, the Pueblo of Jemez Tribal community was honored with a Project Excellence Award for its broadband project, building out a fiber network to reach more than 670 unserved or underserved households, Tribal departments, programs, and businesses.

In presenting the award, Jeff Lopez, Director of the New Mexico Office of Broadband Access and Expansion (OBAE), highlighted the transformative work the Tribe has been doing since it received an $8.6 million grant for the $15 million project, courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in Nov. 2023.

In accepting the award on behalf of the work being done by the tribally-owned and operated Internet service provider known as JNET, Governor George Shendo Jr. of Jemez Pueblo, said in a statement:

“We are honored to be recognized by the Department of Finance and Administration for its inaugural broadband Project Excellence Award. We are excited to fully realize all the opportunities our broadband project will bring to current and future generations in Jemez and the surrounding communities.”

Since January of 2024, JNET has been constructing its fiber-to-the home (FTTH) network, building-out more than 45 miles of fiber to date. More than 40 homes have already been lit up for service with the project expected to be finished in 2026.

Last year the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, a new study indicates that many ISPs aren’t doing a great job adhering to the rules. The Trump FCC has also announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections.

The new academic study (first reported on by Broadband Breakfast) by York University researchers Jonathan A. Obar and Boxi Chen gave 35 different U.S. ISPs a ten-star based grade on how well they are adhering to the FCC broadband label requirements, including label placement, standardized formatting, machine-readable data files, and required policy links.

The results weren’t pretty: only sixteen ISPs properly placed labels at the point of sale as required, and not a single ISP received full marks for completely adhering to the FCC’s requirements. Only six ISPs received a full ten star ranking for proper formatting.

Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NTIA administrator Arielle Roth said last week that the agency she oversees will withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation similar to New York’s Affordable Broadband Act.

As the assistant secretary overseeing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, Roth’s legal reasoning is striking.

All the more so given that the New York Affordable Broadband Act that requires Internet service providers in the Empire State to offer a low-cost broadband service plan to income-eligible households has been upheld as Constitutional – a case in which the Supreme Court twice declined to intervene and overturn.

Yet, last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment. During her speech, Roth said:

“Consistent with the law, which explicitly prohibits regulating the rates charged for broadband service, NTIA is making clear that states cannot impose rate regulation on the BEAD program. To protect the BEAD investment, we are clarifying that BEAD providers must be protected throughout their service area in a state, while the provider is still within its BEAD period of performance. Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”

The stakes are high for broadband affordability advocates across the nation.