Insanity is defined as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different consequence,” according to Albert Einstein.
Congress is taking this to a whole new level with its latest debate about how to “fix” broadband internet implementation across the United States.
My 10th month working as a broadband advocate is this year. Seven of those years were spent serving as the 5th  House District’s State Representative in Missouri. I was working on this topic as a community activist three times before being elected to office. Why? Because my area of the state was fortunate to have one of the top ten districts in Missouri that was not served. Why was that the situation? Major League online services didn’t care whether we lived or died in Northeast Missouri because, with a few exceptions, they did not care.
Remember those days when internet service providers treated us like provinces, evicted us, and offered us a lot in return? I do. The Federal government, to its credit, made the decision to address the problem because everyone at the time knew that a lack of internet access was hampered by economic growth and online training.
Sadly, what they did was completely incorrect. Instead of investing heavily in promising new technologies, it threw billion at the lowest cost option. Instead of painstakingly examining the areas in need of high speed internet, they took the easy way out and declared that where one guy out of a thousand had great speed online, anyone did.
They were aware of that as horseshit at the time, but they continued to pour great money after bad. Instead of evaluating bids carefully, they decided to apply the “reverse bid” approach to a company that has become an absolute necessity to participate in the 21st , century economy. Reverse auctions make perfect sense when you’re buying paper napkins and toilet paper in large quantities for federal buildings but not for delivering anything as challenging as installing high-speed online.
The end result of these efforts across the country was an unholy mess that made it impossible for the people in rural and urban America who so sorely needed high speed internet to access it. Billions of dollars ‘ worth of bids were so small that it was actually difficult to install even maddeningly slow fixed-wireless internet in the areas that they “won”.
Fly-by-night and quite mercenary internet companies bid so little to increase market share that trustworthy providers refused to even bet. The Federal government, not your typical small city town council, may have rejected those bids as impossible to fulfill. It doubled down on round after round, compounding its issues. Add to that the “maps” that were “provided” by businesses that refused to reveal where all of their served names were located, and you have a complete slew of God-awful mistakes all over the United States.
Finally, a really horrible pandemic broke out. COVID-19 disrupted the way our quite world functioned. People who had worked for years stayed at home. Lessons in colleges that met in person were “remote.” Those who were sick but not with COVID scrambled to find a way to prevent exposure to COVID , and tried to get what had been up to that point a novelty, healthcare. And what we discovered throughout the country was that none of those features could be sustainedly sustained without the availability of broadband internet.
People who had relied on the internet to obtain long documents used to download video game and spree watch Netflix then had to do so. Virtually everything changed in a matter of days —and then we sent the kids home from school. When all the chaos started to happen, and companies that had paid through the nose for the fastest internet abruptly sat at their laptops waiting for the” spinning circle of death” as their computers were unable to send out emails, accept bills, or maintain their home pages.
I started receiving phone calls about this and asked officials in state government what was going on because I was” the broadband guy.” The solution: from the top business hrs of 9-4, 40-45 % of all the speed in the express was being soaked up by two institutions: Netflix and YouTube.
No single anticipated that at first.
The Federal government took action first with the CARES Act, which was put up in a hurry and was a mess, and then the American Rescue Plan Act, which demonstrated that the Federal government could get it right by listening to everyone who had a CARES-related complaint.
What was at the bottom of one’s listing? online with wide coverage.
The Federal government left the heavy lifting of bandwidth application up to the individual states, sending enormous sums of money to the states along the lines of wall offers, at its best. Where CARES had come down like a sledgehammer, ARPA landed like a bird.
State jumped into action, establishing bandwidth offices and funds where they had been weeks prior. We are currently investing well over$ 2.2 billion in broadband implementation funding in Missouri. When we began in 2020, we were at zero. We were well on our way to resolving the issues that had plagued us for ten years by the Missouri General Assembly leaving the Capitol for more than a month before passing significant broadband legislation that saw three” No” votes from over 190 people.
We created a good, open, and complete broadband grant process. In 2020 and again in 2022, we passed common sense “guardrail” language to make sure that our broadband cash did reach the people it was supposed to. We implemented stringent claw-back and snap site inspection laws to ensure that broadband providers using taxpayer dollars kept on time and on budget by installing “vertical real estate” ( towers and antennae ) to help increase the reach of fixed wireless assets. The Federal government stayed out of our approach while COVID sharpened our focus and made us take action right away to ensure role.
Thus far, so great.
The Government finally made the decision to invest for the first time in America with the$ 42. 5 billion system intended to permanently bridge the digital divide.
The length of time it has taken to build has been one of the most vocal accusations of BEAD. On its mouth, that is a good condemnation. Nevertheless, the criticism is unsupported when contextualized. No one is enquiring as to why it took so long.
The basic solution: Maps.
Over the years, the Federal Communications Commission released a number of drawings that were at best weak. They relied on providers to fill the gaps, had poor use, and were miserably inaccurate because of census block methodology. At one of my Interim Broadband Committee hearings in 2021, we showed an FCC map for a committee member’s area of the state which was basically all green —” covered”. He jumped up, went to the movie screen, pointed to the chart, and yelled,” That’s a lie!” out loud because he was so upset at how it was depicted.
His fury was properly directed. State had to get into the mapmaking company. The says had to reinvent the wheel to ensure that laws like ours that mandated leadership were followed after a century of pushing trillions out to providers with much supervision and no perceptible urgency to “get it right”
We opened the maps up to a” problem” approach where people who knew well and also that they were not covered had the chance to “poke holes” in the outdated maps and give us for the first time accurate depictions of truth in order to ensure that the maps were correct. We also rejected the deeply flawed “census block” process in favor of the eminently sensible” community standard”.
By the way, there is a lot of it involved. We released several maps to make sure the funds went to the people who were most in need of them, stating that the funds were unprecedented because Missouri is in line for$ 1.7 billion, which is the third most per capita in the country. In other words, we were finally doing what the Feds were supposed to be doing all along and had abjectly failed to do.
One thing to the critics of the lengthy BEAD process: You can’t use Federal incompetence as a shield and a sword. Due to the lack of Federal foresight, poor implementation, and next-to-zero oversight over the past ten years and more, the states are in this boat.
It gets worse. The most recent “brainstorm” in Congress is to begin limiting how much money can be given to a particular site. This is a back-handed and somewhat careless way to trash fiber, which is widely believed to be the best method for providing high-speed internet, and give the inside scoop on satellite technology. I have really bad news for Congress: no reputable provider with more than one brain cell to rub together is going to propose serving areas that do not make sense with fiber.
No intelligent-living-filled state broadband office will approve any fiber proposals that do not make sense. We are States, and we are much more in tune with the issue we are solving than the bureaucrats in Washington (DC ) who are determined to turn BEAD into a national production of” Groundhog Day.”
Even worse is the fact that with the dawn of artificial intelligence ( AI), what we are now calling” The Need for Speed” is more acute than ever. Over the past ten years, we have already witnessed a geometric progression in speed. Do you remember when 10: 1 was all the rage? In the next three to five years, my providers are telling me that the Federal minimum speed of 100/100, which is currently preferred but not required, will be obsolete. We will zoom past 500/500 to a gig in the process.
What else is aimed at us in real time? The expansion of data centers is creating what we’ve been calling “power poverty.” While the media has been focused on the lack of power in the national grid to ensure that electric vehicles can make it from one end of the country to the other, the skyrocketing demands of AI computational requirements and data center power needs have landed upon us full force. We have a serious issue as a country when Microsoft decides to recommission a dormant nuclear power plant to meet its own AI needs.
What does the phrase” Need for Speed” mean for those who are tethered to satellite internet or struggling with$ 30 monthly data plans? The least of your worries is latency issues. The biggest worry is that the AI revolution will completely leave you behind, just like the people I speak to today in my state who cannot work from home, make telehealth Zoom calls remotely, or even make a 911 call function.
Another fact that has escaped the attention of our devoted/satellite-enamored Federal bureaucrats and alleged policymakers is that ( 1 ) what goes up must come down, and ( 2 ) China is launching military satellites almost as quickly as it is constructing coal-fired power plants.
What could they possibly do with “killer satellites”? If we decide to invade Taiwan militarily, how about shooting down our extraterrestrial communication capability to blind us and render our communications mute? I have no doubt that the Chinese have invented lasers that can remove buried fiber cables from any location in the United States, but they also have no doubt that they can bring us “back to the Stone Age” by annihilating our GPS-based economy.
Another point to ponder with regard to speed: Satellites can only do as much as existing and emerging technologies let them. Since the first time those resources were deployed, Fixed Wireless has had a lot of trouble delivering faster speeds. Despite their recent improvements, satellites are similarly situated.
Fiber, on the other hand, is future-proof. Dig once, bury it, and forget about it for 50 years. Because it uses glass as its conductor, it can deliver unrestricted speeds and be upgraded over time for decades.
You get what you pay for.
This is not the right time to short circuit BEAD. It’s not the right time to invest in cheap broadband internet. We have been there, done that, and that is precisely what landed us in this mess to begin with.
So, Federalers, kindly do us a favor. Stop trying to fix things. You have done more than enough harm already.
Accept Federalism as it is what you vouch for. The States have resolved the issues you brought up. Admit it and get on with your lives.
Government is not the solution to our problem, as Ronald Reagan so famously put it. The issue is “government.
The key to good advice is taking it.
Leave us at home. BEAD by itself, not leave. And for once, get out of the way and stay out of the way.
Groundhog Day is best seen on a screen rather than by those who still don’t have broadband internet.
Louis Riggs represents Hannibal, Missouri as a state representative in the Missouri House of Representatives. A version of this Expert Opinion originally published by Benton Institute for Broadband &, Society on Feb. 3, 2025, and is reprinted with permission.
Broadband Breakfast accepts commentary from knowledgeable experts on the broadband industry. Send pieces to or . The views reflected in Expert Opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of Broadband Breakfast and Breakfast Media LLC.