Five Years to Fiber

The largest broadband investment in American history is about to start putting fiber in the ground in the counties around us. Florida was allocated $1.16 billion. Alabama, $1.4 billion. The unserved locations this money targets are disproportionately rural — the Panhandle, the Black Belt, the counties between Pensacola and Montgomery. I've spent nearly 20 years in this industry, in this region. So I've been watching this one closely.

Here's the timeline that should get more attention than it does.

The law passed in November 2021. Florida filed its letter of intent in July 2022. The challenge process — determining which locations actually qualify — wasn't approved until April 2025. Then in June 2025, the federal government rewrote the program rules mid-stream, rescinding prior guidance and giving every state 90 days to redo its work. Florida's final proposal went in that October. NTIA approved it in January 2026. Construction: spring 2026.

Five years from law to shovels. The first half-decade of the largest infrastructure investment in broadband history produced, almost exclusively, compliance documents.

Now look at who came through the process. Alabama's provisional award list is instructive. The largest single award went to Comcast — $157 million. AT&T took $93 million. That part surprises no one. But keep reading the list: Millry Telephone, $9.4 million. Farmers Telecommunications, $8.3 million. Ardmore Telephone, $3.2 million. Small rural Alabama telcos, competing and winning.

What separated the small providers who won from the ones who never made the list wasn't size — it was the capacity to survive the process. Federal grant applications, letters of credit, environmental reviews, labor certifications, challenge filings. The providers with grant-writing and compliance muscle got through a five-year gauntlet. The ones without it aren't on the list — and their absence doesn't show up in any official record. The communities they might have served just wait for someone bigger.

Here's the honest tension. BEAD is the kind of program I've argued for in this series — it mandates building something real, not describing something. You can't paper-comply with fiber in the ground. Some of that process is the legitimate price of spending $42 billion carefully. But a build-something program wrapped in five years of say-something process inherits the flaw it was designed to avoid: the compliance stack, not the construction capability, decides who gets to build.

For northwest Florida and south Alabama, that's not an abstraction. It determines which counties get fiber from a national carrier on a national timeline — and which ones get it from a local provider who answers the phone.

The money is finally moving. Worth watching who it moves through.