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- By Chez Oxendine
- Economic Development
The federal government’s biggest tribal broadband program continues to see demand far outstrip available funding.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) reported it received more than 160 applications totaling $2.64 billion for the second round of funding under the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP). Those requests are considerably more than the $980 million that NTIA has to distribute to tribes in the funding round.
This isn’t the first time tribal demand has far exceeded funding supply for the TBCP program. Established in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act, the program originally allocated $980 million toward funding Native-led broadband projects designed to get access to households without reliable high-speed internet service.
In response, tribes submitted more than 280 applications totalling $5 billion in requests, prompting Congress to allocate another $2 billion to the program in 2022. That allocation was split between widening the first funding opportunity and opening a second round in July of last year. The second funding opportunity closed Jan. 3.
The TBCP is the federal government’s single-largest funding pool specifically for tribal broadband. So far, the program has distributed $1.86 billion of its funding, according to an NTIA map of awards.
Oversubscription shows the need is still there, according to Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson.
“For Tribal communities to thrive in the modern digital economy, they need access to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet service,” Davidson said in a statement. “The number of applications for our Tribal connectivity program shows that demand remains high for quality Internet service in Indian Country.”
Other programs, such as the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development ReConnect Program, have funneled additional monies into Indian Country for broadband. The NTIA’s Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program distributed $42 billion to states last year that could trickle down to tribes.
Dedicated funding has fallen far short of the ultimate need, however. Industry expert Matthew Rantanen, vice president of tribal broadband at nonprofit GoldenStateNet, estimates solving tribal broadband would cost $11 billion.
“This program laid down a foundational start to this but it’s not the end-all solution,” Rantanen told Tribal Business News in a prior story. “There’s still a need out there that needs to be met.”
