Nevada’s BEAD Plan Is Shortchanging Real Digital Divide Progress

Nevada’s provisional choices for how to spend its share of the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program reflect a misunderstanding of the digital divide. To be fair, this misunderstanding is coming from the top: Nevada’s plan needs the approval of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), whose guidance requires strong preferences for costly fiber projects at the expense of addressing more widespread causes of the digital divide. NTIA should reverse its mistake and require Nevada to do the same.

Two critical facts about the digital divide:

• Broadband deployment is a relatively small cause of the digital divide.
• High-speed Low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite broadband service is available throughout Nevada and can be deployed for $600 per location.

Nevada’s plan, however, ignores both of these facts, spending huge sums on deployment, thus leaving little if any money left over to address affordability and other more pressing causes of the digital divide.

Nevada’s awards total just under $554 million to serve 51,607 locations—an average cost per location of $10,730. But some awards were much more expensive. 6 of its 19 awards will cost more than $20,000 per location. One, to Truleap Technologies, will cost over $40,000 per location, and another, to Beehive Broadband, an eye-popping $77,000 per location.

Think about the tradeoff Nevada has made. If instead of serving 286 locations for $77,000 each, Nevada had instead bought each of those locations a Starlink terminal for $600 each, it could have also paid the monthly bill for each location for over 50 years. Furthermore, those households could get LEO service immediately, rather than waiting years for Beehive Broadband to build their fiber network.

And while the Beehive example is the most egregious case, the same math applies to the overall plan. For the same price as its current proposal, Nevada could buy each household a LEO satellite terminal and pay the monthly bill for over 7 years. Or it could simply complete deployment by getting LEO service to every location covered by its proposed BEAD awards at a price tag 17 times cheaper than its current plan—$31 million compared to the $554 million.

This is not to say that buying free service for BEAD locations is the best use of funds. There are many Nevada households where service is unaffordable even though broadband infrastructure is already deployed. Before it expired earlier this year, 276,024 Nevada households subscribed to the Affordable Connective Program (ACP), a federal program that gave low-income households up to $30 per month for broadband. Nevada could use savings from a more reasonable deployment plan to provide a similar affordability benefit to its low-income residents. Under its current proposal, that money will instead line the pockets of ISPs that build networks that are more expensive than they need to be.

It's not too late for NTIA and Nevada to change course. They should stop their irrational preferencing of fiber deployments and require that states choose the most economical technologies to complete deployment so that leftover funds can address more widespread and serious causes of the digital divide.