All across the country, a group of connectivity experts teaches locals, old and young, about the benefits of getting online.
These workers, called Digital Navigators, link people in the community with the resources and opportunities they don’t know exist, like arranging online health appointments, applying for jobs, doing homework and making their businesses visible on the internet. But the grant funding the Digital Navigators is one of many programs currently at risk.
Under the Biden administration, infrastructure and COVID pandemic recovery bills included $90 billion in federal funding meant to link Americans to high-speed internet. But now, President Donald Trump’s latest policy changes and executive orders are disrupting progress and causing uncertainty. From what internet industry insiders can tell, the regulators under the Trump administration seemingly want to change how that money is allocated to internet providers. If you thought fiber expansion efforts were slow before, experts we talked to estimate this will delay it even further.
“I would say a year or more,” said Drew Garner, director of policy at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
It’s not just about delays, either. Analysts CNET spoke with say that state-driven fiber infrastructure plans will be re-evaluated in ways that favor satellite internet, like that provided by Starlink, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has the president’s ear. (We reached out to Starlink and Musk for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.)
“Every statement [the Commerce Department and NTIA] have said gives us every indication that they are going to prioritize and increase the role of satellite internet in the BEAD program, which would come at the expense of fiber and other technologies,” Garner said.
Satellite internet can be cheaper to set up, since it needs only receivers to tap into the satellites already orbiting. Fiber, on the other hand, is more future proof and much faster, but pricier to install — and it’s precisely this funding hump that BEAD’s once-in-a-lifetime pile of money was supposed to solve.
So what happens if the procedural plans to expand fiber infrastructure and connect millions of disconnected Americans are forcibly revised to make room for satellite internet like Musk’s Starlink?
Experts say using satellites to bridge the broadband gap isn’t the best long-term solution. Blair Levin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and lead for the Obama-era FCC’s National Broadband Plan, pointed out that Starlink still has a waiting list, and it would be challenging to take on more customers. In contrast, fiber “lasts longer, on an operating expense it’s cheaper, and it serves community needs, not just individual needs,” Levin said.
Ultimately, replacing planned fiber with satellite seems like a bandage approach that would delay the inevitable need for a permanent fix.
“The potential transition to more satellite technology will be more efficient, if that’s the goal, but I think in a few years, we’ll be back to having the same conversation again about how rural America needs fiber, and I’d like to take the opportunity to just get that done,” said Sara Nichols, energy and economic development manager for Land of Sky, an organization supporting connectivity for western North Carolina.
What’s at stake if fiber and digital education funding is lost
That $90 billion in funding was designed to upgrade 7.2 million Americans with slow internet connections identified by the FCC in 2023 to higher-speed internet, and improve access to work, education, shopping and online socializing. The Trump administration’s moves will most likely affect two large slices of that funding: the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program and the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Access.
These changes are happening without addressing those most affected: the American public. The Digital Navigators could have been helping people on March 1, but the DEA funding for the organization sponsoring them, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, has been held up for undisclosed reasons — as has all DEA funding.
NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer believes it could be because “equity” is in the program name, which has been enough for the FCC under Trump to launch probes into Verizon and Comcast for DEI practices.
In response, some DEA-funded projects have begun swapping out “equity” for “access” in their names, in hopes that the approvals will start rolling in.
“It’s a little ridiculous that we’re spending as much time as we are changing words, but if that’s what’s necessary to keep doing the work, that’s what I’m going to do,” Siefer said
BEAD and DEA are such massive projects that they needed many years to run through stages of bids, proposals and approvals. However, on the cusp of this money finally getting out to states and organizations, it seems the regulators under the Trump administration are requiring changes.
North Carolina’s rural populace is tired of the connectivity mirage
For Land of Sky, Nichols helps plan and develop for multiple counties in western North Carolina. Each state handles connecting its populations to broadband differently, and Nichols helps ISPs understand policy changes while guiding local governments on how state and federal programs impact residents.
For a part of the state with a rural population and mountainous areas expensive to reach with digital infrastructure, finding market-efficient ways to connect the populace has been challenging, Nichols said.
North Carolina has used funding from the American Rescue Plan Act and other sources to connect more households without broadband. Nichols said some have been overlooked by previous waves of fiber, like households at the end of long driveways or existing housing projects. Others are remote, peppered through rural areas that have needed big funding projects to be connected.
Nichols estimated that 40,000 western North Carolinians still lack high-speed internet, and the state’s attempt to connect these households is a patchwork of old and new efforts and many hurdles. For example, before the pandemic, the state enacted the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, designed to expand fiber infrastructure in 10-year rollouts. Rescue Plan funding was intended to reach households in much shorter periods. But to ensure efficiency, the state can’t use multiple funding sources for areas already slated with RDOF funding.
But in her corner of North Carolina, Nichols is well aware of the changes that could be coming to BEAD — and how a satellite infusion could threaten these longer-term plans to connect everyone in the state.
“If the programs work the way we planned, I have confidence that we could hit a 98% to 100% connectivity with some mixed technology,” Nichols said. “With some of the changes that might come from the federal government, I’m concerned about what that would mean.”
North Carolina’s rural citizens have become wary of government promises. When they do come around to provide for them, they bring in things that are cheap and don’t last long, Nichols said.
“Working with rural America for as long as I have, they’re tired of things that don’t work, and they kind of know to ask for fiber by name and prefer fiber,” Nichols said.
Fiber has benefits that suit rural America, and it covers BEAD’s requirements, like scalability and a low-cost option that would incentivize use, Nichols said — an important consideration when 63% of US adults reported higher internet bills than they had last year, according to a CNET survey. Fiber-optic technology also meets long-term climate resiliency, another BEAD requirement ISP proposals currently need to satisfy.
That is why the BEAD changes worry Nichols. The preference for satellite won’t help North Carolina long term; it also doesn’t bring in the short- and long-term jobs to install and maintain the networks. As fiber networks have been observed operating for 35 years and are expected to last much longer, according to the Fiber Broadband Association, that’s a longevity of local jobs that wouldn’t be there with satellite.
Satellite as a short-term solution
Most experts agree satellite technology serves a purpose — as a short-term resilience plan. Satellite absolutely has its place, Nichols said. When Hurricane Helene carved a path of destruction through the western half of the state last year, wiping out physical and digital infrastructure as affected areas went offline, satellite internet connected people cut off from conventional communications.
“Starlink saved the day for us in the storm,” Nichols said. “I’ve still got boxes of Starlink units on my shelf in my office here, because it was the thing that worked.”
However, satellite internet also has significant downsides compared to fiber, like disrupted signal in rough weather conditions and when trying to connect from underground.
The disaster opened up Nichols’ eyes to how necessary another BEAD requirement is: that infrastructure funded by the program can endure more severe weather, something she didn’t have strong opinions about before the storm.
“Now I have a conversation every day about communications technology resiliency, because we saw first-hand our cell signal be decimated and our middle-mile networks destroyed,” Nichols said. Thousands of people under Land of Sky’s local governments still don’t have internet six months after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina.
“I want a Starlink unit in every fire station, police station, hospital, school, community center — I want them all to have a Starlink unit sitting on the shelf, but I want it to be the resiliency plan,” Nichols said.
Nichols said satellite internet would be a good option if it takes $100,000 to connect a home with wired internet. But that doesn’t mean satellite can replace the usefulness, scalability and service that fiber internet is expected to provide, including in the BEAD proposals for North Carolina.
There’s a place for satellite connectivity, and most BEAD plans already have some of their funding going to satellite services to cover areas where it makes the most sense. This includes remote areas or where it’s difficult to lay fiber — such as the Appalachian mountain chain in North Carolina. It’s a perfect location for satellite internet, but if these alleged changes that the Trump administration is believed to have enacted are true, much of the state’s rural high-speed internet access, promised as fiber through BEAD, could be jeopardized.
Broadband expansion delayed for satellite’s gain
Congress approved BEAD and DEA funding through the $1.2 trillion 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Those monies have been divvied up, with states and organizations in various stages of submitting their funding plans to get paid out in the coming years.
BEAD’s progress had been recorded in the program’s official dashboard through the start of Trump’s term — though the dashboard itself has since been replaced with what seems to be a screenshot of its last progress. You can see at which stage all 50 states and the US territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, have reached until April 14. Only three states — Louisiana, Nevada and Delaware — were far enough along as of March to nearly start spending the money and were just waiting on NTIA’s approval to start building, Garner said.
“That’s been the case for months now, and NTIA has not given them the green light, so people are just sitting there waiting for news,” Garner said.
The NTIA declined to comment, while the FCC did not respond to multiple requests from CNET for comment.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology must also sign off on these plans, and it apparently has not, said analyst Levin. Analysts said these delays have rippled into a holding pattern, with states unclear whether or how they’ll need to change their proposals to satisfy the new rules for BEAD funding. These revisions are expected to be handed down from Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.
“The problem that the secretary has is, the longer he takes, the more political pain, because you have a lot of states that are already well down the road,” Levin said.
Most of these state-by-state plans were divided according to how they’d connect their constituents, most prominently using fiber, which provides reliable high-speed internet with other advantages like adding local jobs. The plans also include using limited fixed-wireless solutions on mobile 5G networks and satellite internet, where it makes sense. Still, by and large, most of the ways these states initially planned to beef up their infrastructure was by laying fiber cable. Those plans sound like they’ll do a great job, with Garner estimating 95% or more Americans will be connected to high-speed broadband after they’re fulfilled.
But according to experts like Garner, regulators may have revised requirements for BEAD funding, like lowering reliability and latency minimums. They may even potentially scrap the necessity for a low-cost option that ISPs must offer customers. These revisions could open all that funding up to, and perhaps even favor, satellite.
“They have not made any official statements, so we’re all still in the dark, but the goals and language that [US Secretary of Commerce] Lutnik and the nominee to lead the NTIA, Arielle Roth, have said gives us every indication that they are going to prioritize and increase the role of satellite internet in the BEAD program, which would come at the expense of fiber and other technologies,” Garner said.
Presumably, this would open up more of BEAD to SpaceX for its Starlink satellite network and Amazon’s forthcoming Kuiper service, Garner said. He’s not alone in thinking so — former BEAD director Evan Feinman reportedly said as much in his farewell email sent to the US Commerce Department in mid-March. While the degree of the shift from fiber to satellite was unknown then, he said that regardless of the size, it “will be a disservice to rural and small-town America.”
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman reportedly wrote in his email posted on Bluesky.
With SpaceX’s Starlink being a prominent provider of satellite internet connectivity, and CEO Elon Musk within Trump’s inner circle, it hasn’t gone unnoticed — by Feinman or The New York Times — that much of that funding could be redirected to Musk.
“Under current rules, maybe satellite gets hundreds of millions [of dollars]. If they make all the changes Musk would want to make it as favorable to satellite as possible, then satellite could get tens of billions [of dollars],” Garner said.
This would be a sizable chunk of the $42.5 billion total in BEAD funding.
An uncertain future for all possibilities of the internet
In a time of uncertainty, people rely on the internet more than ever — to get information, stay connected with family, reach out for help and plan for the future. The $90 billion in funding designated during President Joe Biden’s term was meant to update American homes and communities so they could harness the opportunities of our connected world. What the country had was a solid timeline for progress to be made. Since Trump took office, that’s changed.
What’s at stake are the state’s well-crafted plans to ensure the least-served people and areas benefit from high-speed internet and access to lasting technologies. Last year, analyst Levin said the funding, which included BEAD and DEA, was a once-in-a-lifetime pile of money to pay for networks and solutions that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
While it will be easy to see the infrastructure that BEAD built, DEA will be less tactile but still important: advancing Americans’ online literacy, which makes us more knowledgeable and globally competitive. Digital Navigators, for example, help individuals embrace telehealth, understand digital health records and save money on transport to and from a doctor’s office.
Some of these efforts have knock-on effects, Siefer noted: If grandma can talk to the grandkids, that helps with the anxiety around loneliness that might have sent her to the ER — which, in addition to being community-enriching, saves the country money. Even teaching people how to get questions answered in Google searches helps build a self-sufficient resiliency that, writ large, makes Americans stronger in the global marketplace, Siefer said.
The uncertainty and current holding pattern are delaying Americans’ access to faster internet — whether for weeks, months or years. With the Trump administration’s decisions seemingly poised to raise prices for consumers and cause immigration panic, the reality of another pause to upgrade internet services is apparently low on the list of priorities.
For many living in remote areas that have been overlooked and underserviced by telecoms and ISPs, watching the rest of the country get high-speed internet reinforces their perspective that the US government has once again overpromised and underdelivered. Even if they’re provided satellite internet to cover their immediate needs, they won’t have the infrastructure foundation of a fiber network. And if their satellite provider closes up shop, all they’re left with is a lot of signal receivers that may not work with another company’s satellite network system.
BEAD and DEA are opportunities for the US to catch up with digital infrastructure and education, which is sorely needed in communities that may not get a better shot. But the need to stay current on technology is amplified by the dawn of generative AI — not just having the connection speed to use it, but the education to best harness it.
“In the same way that broadband is essential for participation in the economy and society, access to AI will be similar,” Levin said. “If we think that AI is going to be critical, then we need a workforce that is comfortable using the tools of AI.”
So while the timeline of BEAD was always measured in the better part of a decade, given its passage in 2021 and expectation to start rolling out to the first states this year, it’s an investment in America that suddenly feels more timely than ever with AI in every product and headline.
If Americans want the fiber networks on which their taxpayer dollars were spent, they can call their congressional representatives, who approved it in the first place and should be overseeing BEAD and DEA progress today. If the Trump administration delays and diminishes this connectivity, everyone will be hurt, regardless of political affiliation.
BEAD was designed to help connect the unconnected, and it’s mostly rural Americans — who skew right-leaning and likely Trump-supporting — that need infrastructure to get high speeds. That’s what the “equity” in BEAD truly stands for, and folks who have fought for the best version of the internet in America believe that it should be universally given for the betterment of the country as a whole.
“I believe strongly in the principle, when it comes to communications, we ought to have a communication system that makes it available everywhere and affordable to everyone,” Levin said. “We want all Americans to be equitably included in participating in the economy and society, and you can’t do that without access to broadband.”
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