White House Tips $42B for Broadband Buildout: How Much Does Your State Get?
The Biden administration today unveiled(Opens in a new window) a giant round of federal grants with an equally outsized goal: get a broadband connection to everybody in the United States by 2030.
The $42.45 billion in allocations span all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, as well as American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, drawing on funding included in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act(Opens in a new window).
“It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever,” President Biden said at a White House event Monday. “We’re going to be able to connect every person in America to reliable high-speed Internet by 2030.”
The formula used to determine these Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD(Opens in a new window)) grants emphasizes the number of unconnected locations that would be expensive to connect. On that metric, Texas comes out far ahead, qualifying for more than $3.31 billion in BEAD funding. California is second, with $1.86 billion.
The other states to exceed a billion each are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. (Check out the full breakdown on InternetforAll.gov(Opens in a new window).)
At the White House event, Vice President Kamala Harris said 24 million people in the US lack broadband, either because it’s not available or because they can’t afford it. “Let us agree that in the 21st century in America, high-speed internet is not a luxury. It is a necessity,” she said.
BEAD, run by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information
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