Arkansas Experiences 25% Decline in Applicants for BEAD Funding
Arkansas broadband director also warned that BEAD projects may be delayed into 2026.
DENVER, August 5, 2025 – Arkansas’s State Broadband Director said Tuesday that the state had experienced a 25 percent decline in the number of applicants seeking funding from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
According to Arkansas State Broadband Director Glen Howie, the state went from 44 applicants in the original BEAD program to just 33 in the "Benefit of the Bargain" round.
“We moved from 44 applicants in the prior version to 33 applicants this time,” Howie told attendees at Mountain Connect on Tuesday. “We did everything we could to keep people on the boat.”
Howie’s admission seemed to justify fears that redoing the BEAD bidding round would lead to reduced participation from providers. Other broadband directors maintained that participation in their BoB rounds was robust, but didn’t provide any exact figures.
“Obviously a lot of the applicants that had originally participated were not necessarily happy that they had to do it all over again,” Thomas Tyler, Deputy Director at ConnectLA, said. “But we managed to maintain their participation so we thought that was a good outcome.”
Howie also expressed concern about getting projects started once BEAD money was allocated. He explained that in Arkansas, the state’s general assembly must sign off on the program before any work gets started. That plus environmental review could push the start dates for BEAD projects in Arkansas into the new year.
Brian Mitchell, Director of the Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology at Nevada’s State Broadband Office, also expressed concern that projects in his state would be delayed by permitting processes.
“We’re a state that is 86 percent federal land, and so you can’t throw a stone without hitting land that one of the alphabet soup federal land managing agencies own,” Mitchell explained. “So if we’re talking literal shovels in the ground there may be some increase in timelines there depending on what the project area looks like and what federal land they have to cross.”
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