Former FCC Chairman Urges County-Level BEAD Project Areas

DENVER, August 7, 2024 – Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and his private equity firm, now involved in the largest federal broadband program, has advised states to create grant funding areas based on large geographic unit, like counties.

Pai, speaking on Tuesday panel here at the Mountain Connect conference, joined several of his now-colleagues at Searchlight Capital Partners in discussing “why private capital is key to winning BEAD.” That's a reference to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program.

The $42.45 billion BEAD program tasks each state with identifying unserved and underserved communities for funding. 

States have been thinking about the size of their project areas since they submitted their initial proposals in December 2023, but were not required to define the size of their project areas for sub-grant awards when they filed their initial proposals. 

“Searchlight urged [states] to think about an entire county as the relevant project area, as opposed to say a service location or even a census block or census tract,” Pai said.

This strategy is important to prevent "cherry picking" higher-value areas that are more densely populated, or have a higher per capita income, among those locations slated for funding, he said.

“As all of us know, over the last couple of decades, those areas tend not to get served ever, even through programs like this,” Pai said.

Pai said that the historic levels of funding states are receiving under BEAD will allow them to fund fiber-based projects that reach all unserved and underserved locations. 

“Nothing against some of the other technologies, but we think given the amount of money that Congress allocated for this program,” said Pai, “That's enough to underwrite fiber projects in parts of the country where… RDOF could never have underwritten.”

He was referring to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a broadband deployment program funded through the FCC, and which kicked off in October 2020, under Pai’s chairmanship.

Although industry and state leaders have taken varying stances on the program's reliance on fiber, Pai argued that fiber represents a long-term investment: “Fiber is a much more forward looking technology in terms of this investment being multi decade.”

Also speaking on the panel were fellow Searchlight partners Alejandro Batista, managing director, and Darren Glatt, head of infrastructure investing, as well as Chuck Hogg, senior vice president of All Points Broadband, which has received investment from Searchlight.