FBA, Benton Pleased By New BEAD Round, Electric Co-ops Want ‘Course Correction’
Based on tentative location counts, as much as $2.4 billion could be available for additional projects
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2026 – Electric cooperatives are hoping for a new direction in the recently announced round of bidding under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
The Trump administration said last week states would use some of their remaining allocations under the program to fund more deployment projects targeting areas stranded by inaccurate mapping and defaults in other programs.
About $21 billion is expected to be left over, although it likely won’t all be used on the clean-up round.
While NRECA, which represents co-ops, wasn’t immediately sold, a fiber trade association and consumer advocacy group were pleased. State officials said last week they were happy to cover more locations, but wished they had more flexibility in determining them and worried about logistical difficulties.
Electric co-ops have been upset with BEAD this year, mostly because of a January rule that would require them to operate under federal pole attachment rules throughout any state where they accepted BEAD dollars.
Federal rules govern rates and other aspects of attachment deals with pole owners and attachers, but they don’t cover co-ops. Many state-level rules also don’t apply.
For the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, that required the agency to step in and make sure there were some rules ensuring participants that owned poles gave out fair deals.
NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said in a statement that “delayed implementation, shifting guidance, cost constraints and unrealistic funding assumptions” had “weakened a historic opportunity” in BEAD.
“NTIA must allow flexibility for cost increases created by program delays, align funding levels with the actual cost of deploying broadband infrastructure in America’s hardest-to-reach communities and remove fatally flawed pole attachment rules that clearly break from long-standing federal policy,” he said.
The Fiber Broadband Association, which represents fiber ISPs, for its part was happy to see more deployment money flowing.
“NTIA’s decision to prioritize a cleanup round aimed at reaching locations that still lack reliable broadband service should be applauded,” the group said in a statement. “Ensuring that no American is left behind is one of the most important uses of remaining BEAD funds and is essential to fulfilling the program’s central promise of connecting every household in every community.”
That, the group said, should be done with fiber. FBA said state broadband offices should have flexibility in how they designed their clean-up rounds.
Revati Prasad, executive director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, said in a statement that the group supported a new effort to find locations missed by BEAD during bidding last year.
She said the group was eager to hear how states could use the rest of the non-deployment funding. NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth had said guidance was coming by the end of the summer, which the agency said Friday referred to the clean-up round notice.
An agency spokesperson said that more non-deployment guidance would come when NTIA had a better idea of the money being spent. That won't happen right away, since states get three months to revise eligible location lists and NTIA has another three months to review and approve state plans after bidding.
Rough cost estimate
In NTIA’s policy notice last week, the agency said it would determine how much money each state could spend on the new deployment round using the average per-location cost from their existing spending plans.
That per-location cost would be multiplied by the number of newly eligible locations to get the maximum amount the state could spend on new deployment projects.
Based on the NTIA-approved plans from all 56 states and territories, and tentative NTIA tallies of eligible locations obtained by Broadband Breakfast, that methodology would put the clean-up round funding at $2.4 billion in total. That funding would be aimed at more than 470,000 locations.
The amount of money actually spent, and number locations actually eligible, will likely differ from those estimates.
The NTIA location counts are tentative and might be changed before broadband offices are sent official lists. States and territories will then refine those lists over three months; they can only remove locations that were improperly included.
NTIA said in its notice that, like last time, it would scrutinize state plans to ensure they were keeping deployment costs as low as possible.
Jeff Lopez, director of New Mexico’s broadband office, said last week that some locations eligible for BEAD funding in the main bidding round might not be included in the clean-up round.
Under the 2021 Infrastructure Law, BEAD’s main round of bidding had to cover both un- and underserved locations, but the new true-up round is being conducted under a different part of the law that gives NTIA more discretion, he said.
Unserved locations lack broadband speeds of 25 * 3 megabit per second (Mbps), while underserved have speeds above 25 * 3 Mbps but below 100 * 20 Mbps. The new policy notice only refers to unserved locations, aside from one passing reference.
Before the true-up round, BEAD was set to reach about 3.79 million locations and spend about $18.2 billion. That number is also in flux though, since updated FCC maps also prompted NTIA to ask states to remove hundreds of thousands of satellite locations from awards.
