WI June 14th crowd sizes:

Trump plan to fund Musk’s Starlink over fiber called “betrayal” of rural US

Director of $42 billion broadband fund pushed out, says program is being ruined.

Feinman urged people to contact their representatives in Congress and the Trump administration and urge them to avoid “the worst version” of the planned changes. “They should fix BEAD by removing the requirements that have nothing to do with building infrastructure, NOT change it to benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill… There is still time to help the administration make the right call here. Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people,”

The 2021 law that created the BEAD program said the government must prioritize technology that “can easily scale speeds over time to meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses; and support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.”

During the Biden administration, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) decided that fiber architecture is the only technology that achieves the BEAD law’s goal of building future-proof networks. Fiber brings high-speed broadband to homes and businesses and is essential for providing backhaul to support advanced wireless services, the Biden NTIA said.