D.C. Memo: CEO of Minnesota ISP Trade Group Says BEAD Still a Failure

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BEAD: Back in June, Brent Christensen, president and CEO of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance, was asked how many of his ISP members would participate in the BEAD program. "Zero," he told MinnPost. The same publication last week caught up with Christensen for a pre-Thanksgiving update. Essentially, there was no update. “My members are telling me they’re not going to participate. The way that BEAD is structured. I don’t know how anybody’s going to participate," he said. Christensen identified a few “onerous” NTIA rules that he said would hold back his members, especially the smaller ones. One was BEAD's requirement to provide low-cost service to low-income households. “That’s OK when you’ve got a lot of businesses and you’ve got a lot of customers that you can spread that out over. But when you’re a small company in rural Minnesota, you don’t have that customer base to spread it out on so you can’t do that,” Christensen said. MTA, with about 70 members, represents Bevcomm, Red River Communications, and Paul Bunyan Communications. NTIA has said Minnesota will receive $651.8 million in BEAD money. Melissa Wolf, executive director of the Minnesota Cable Communications Association, told MinnPost that if BEAD's rules had tracked with successful broadband deployment programs, some BEAD projects would have already been completed. “But now here we are, four years later, and grant rounds haven’t opened yet. It’s a little disappointing,” Wolf said.