MORGANTOWN — Rene Gonzales, the senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for Lit Communities, said the $1.2 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) dollars coming to West Virginia will undoubtedly aid Monongalia County’s ongoing broadband efforts.
Exactly when and how much remains to be seen.
Gonzales and Lit Communities are a central part of the broadband team assembled by the Monongalia County Commission in May 2021 and tasked with producing a comprehensive broadband plan that will serve as the roadmap to county-wide connectivity.
West Virginia’s slice of the $42 billion federal broadband pie is the 11th largest nationwide based on updated connectivity data looking at individual addresses instead of census tracts. It’s been widely reported that West Virginia has more than 270,000 homes and businesses that fall below the federal broadband standards of 25/3 megabits per second for upload and download speeds.
Connecting those addresses is priority number one, meaning the amount of money coming to Monongalia County will be primarily determined by how many of those addresses fall within its boundaries.
The state has until December to produce that data.
“I would definitely assume the need will be diverse across the state of West Virginia. We know there’s great need, but it will be different,” Gonzales said. “They’re not going to take $1.2B and divide it 55 ways. They’re going to do it based on these numbers of addresses and it will be competitive.”
And time consuming.
When the state’s initial BEAD proposal is produced, that data can be challenged. Once the challenge deadline passes, public and private entities can submit proposals, which will be ranked by the state and included in a final BEAD plan. That document must be complete by spring 2025.
Once dollars are distributed, recipients have five years to build out their projects, meaning the results of some of this funding could conceivably come online in 2030.
“It’s a very long, drawn-out process,” Gonzales said. “I’m very confident that this money will definitely impact the county. It’s just going to take a little bit of time and it’s not going to be a silver bullet.”
Complicating matters is the fact that there are unserved portions of the state and Monongalia County that are ineligible for BEAD funding due to the 2019 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), a $20.4 billion initiative from the Federal Communication Commission that set up a reverse auction process for internet service providers with the goal of getting broadband into unserved and underserved census tracts.
Gonzales said commitments made under RDOF by ISPs like Frontier and CityNet may not be realized for years, if ever.
“From what we know those locations are not going to be on that (BEAD) data set because there’s already a commitment from the FCC to these providers to build that infrastructure,” he said. “If they don’t, the feds can claw back all that assistance.”
Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora said this is one of the frustrations with this process.
“In West Virginia they [Frontier] have gobbled up a lot of these areas, but there’s not a good representation of them actually doing what they said they were going to do,” Sikora said. “Even the senator (Capito) has publicly admonished them for all these grant dollars and all these areas they have locked up but they’re not doing anything.”
Sikora continued.
“When they did the RDOF process in 2020 and 2021, they awarded all those bids, but you look at those areas today and they’re unserved.”
Gonzales said the state will ultimately be responsible for selecting who gets what.
But exactly what must be delivered when that time comes is also unknown.
“When we first started talking about connectivity six years ago, they were talking about getting to the standard of 25/3 (mbps). Now that is considered unserved. It’s amazing how much this has changed. Five years from now, 120 (mbps) may be considered unserved,” Sikora said. “So, to get everybody to 25/3, yeah, maybe. But in today’s world we probably wouldn’t be able to be on this Zoom call at 25/3.”
Sikora said the complexity of navigating all these issues is why the commission brought experts like Gonzales on board.
He said the county intends to push forward with its efforts to connect the county, starting with Ring 11, an unserved vertical strip across western Monongalia County.
Final engineering and cost estimates to build the middle mile infrastructure — likely a mix of wireless and fiber — should be available in the next month.
From there it’ll be about finding a provider or providers to go that final mile to connect the homes and businesses.
“It’s a challenging ring but we’re moving forward,” Sikora said. “If it were easy everybody would already be out there covering that area.”
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