Gigi Sohn: The Town BEAD Forgot
In Louisiana's poorest parish, a $6 million BEAD fiber award became a $150,000 Starlink contract under the Trump administration's rewritten program, leaving Lake Providence behind.
I’m a Washington, D.C. communications policy wonk. I spend my days arguing in the abstract about the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program. Earlier this month, in the far northeastern corner of Louisiana, I saw what those abstractions look like in reality. It isn’t pretty.
The town is Lake Providence, the parish seat of East Carroll Parish. Time Magazine called it “The Poorest Place in America” in the 1990s. Today, East Carroll holds the unhappy distinction of being the parish with the highest poverty rate in the state — an eye-popping 47.3% of residents live below the poverty line, against 18.8% statewide. Two of three working-age adults in the parish are jobless and the population is down 11% since 2010.
It is also deeply segregated. White families live in the larger colonial homes along the lake, and their children go to private school. Black families live in modest, sometimes decrepit houses that are literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Their children attend schools that look like they were built in the 1960s and only got air conditioning in the last 25 years.
One of many abandoned businesses in Lake Providence (top left), The "wrong side of the tracks" (top center), General Trass High School seniors receive free laptops courtesy of Connect Humanity, Ready.net, and Cassandra Toston (top right), Residents of Lake Providence discuss their options for public broadband (bottom left), Representatives of Delta Interfaith, Connect Humanity, and AAPB (bottom right). Photos by Gigi Sohn and JNH Photography
What unites everyone in Lake Providence is contempt for local Internet access.
Lake Providence resident Leatrice Hawkins pays $78 a month for AT&T “Internet 10” — 10 Mbps down, 1 up, speeds that were slow 15 years ago. Wanda Manning, a retired teacher and a leader of Delta Interfaith, a multi-racial group working to unite the community and win fast, affordable broadband, told me how Black students at the public schools have to take their online exams in shifts because Sparklight, a CableOne subsidiary, can’t handle the load.
For a moment, things were looking up. ConnectLA, the state broadband office, awarded fiber provider Conexon $4 million from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Capital Projects Fund to connect the most rural parts of East Carroll Parish. In 2024, ConnectLA proposed a second award: $6 million in BEAD funding to wire up the heart of the town itself.
You can probably guess what happened next.
The Biden administration never finished approving all of the states’ final BEAD proposals. That delay gave the Trump administration room to fundamentally rewrite the program — and, in the process, pull the rug out from under communities like Lake Providence.
The new NTIA’s “Benefit of the Bargain” round, sold as “technology neutral” and laser-focused on lowering costs, was neither a benefit nor a bargain for Lake Providence. A $6 million fiber award became a $150,000 award to satellite Internet provider Starlink. Set aside the technical limitations — and there are many. A service that costs $80 a month for the “lite” tier and $120 for standard is a non-starter in a town where nearly half of its residents live below the poverty line. It also won’t attract new residents, lure former ones back, or entice the kind of businesses that could help Lake Providence climb out of poverty.
So Lake Providence has gone back to the drawing board. After six years of grassroots organizing, Delta Interfaith has launched a nonprofit it hopes could one day own a municipal broadband utility — but raising private money to build a network is a tall order in a poor parish. The group has asked Conexon to build the network anyway and operate it under a sale-leaseback. That proposal has gone nowhere.
Meanwhile, the rest of us — ISPs, consultants, advocates, trade reporters and fellow broadband nerds — wait with bated breath for the next BEAD guidance, FAQ, or hearing with Commerce Secretary Lutnick. We’ve forgotten that these policies land on real people, in real towns, trying to build real lives. Lake Providence is one of many places that a program designed to lift them up has instead left them behind.
That is a national shame.
Gigi Sohn is the Executive Director of the American Association for Public Broadband. AAPB is an organization dedicated to ensuring that communities have the freedom to choose what broadband network best serves their residents. More information can be found at AAPB.us. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
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