When Yvonne and Gregg Poole moved to a property west of Cortland over 20 years ago, they intended to give the old buildings on the land new life. They converted the chicken coop into a guest house. They transformed a grain elevator into a workshop. Once they moved on to the barn, requests started to come in to rent the space, and what started as a passion project became a small business.
They have hosted a bit of everything: graduations, weddings, class reunions, country markets, celebrations of life, even Thanksgiving dinner. But there have been missed opportunities, too, opportunities likely lost, Yvonne Poole says, because of crummy internet access.
The Cortland Opry House held one music workshop there but ran into tech issues and hasn’t been back since. Country market vendors can’t use card readers, requiring cash transactions in our mostly cashless world. When the Pooles explored renting longer term to travel nurses working out of Beatrice, the proposal died for the same reason: Weak internet.
Mere months ago, it seemed like things were finally going to get better.
The Pooles’ property was one of about 30,000 locations in Nebraska initially eligible for federal funding through a broadband program aiming “to connect every American to high speed internet.”
But federal changes to that program — then the way Nebraska implemented those changes — vastly cut the number of Nebraska locations and appear to have left the Pooles and thousands of others out of luck.
Nebraska now plans to use only 11% of the federal money provided to the state, third lowest in the country, according to an industry analysis.
It may end up returning more than $350 million in unspent federal funds even as Nebraskans like the Pooles and thousands of others struggle with unreliable internet.
“What I don’t understand is how they can come within a mile of us and not come down the road,” Yvonne Poole said.
The Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, known as BEAD, was one small piece of the $1.2 trillion Biden-era infrastructure law of 2021.
The broadband portion of the law funneled grant money to the states, which then would award the funds to local projects meant to bring “affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband” to places lacking it.
The State of Nebraska was allocated $405 million, an award touted by Nebraska elected officials like U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, who has previously introduced and sponsored legislation promoting broadband access.
“This once-in-a-generation investment will do much to close the digital divide and provide more Nebraskans with the connectivity they deserve,” the Republican senator said in a 2023 statement.
The work of managing the program was eventually assigned to the new Nebraska Broadband Office after Gov. Jim Pillen created it in early 2023.
As the broadband office mapped locations that were “underserved” or “unserved” by high-speed internet — locations eligible for federal funding — a challenge process allowed local groups, like Seward County’s broadband taskforce, to point out spots in their communities where the maps were inaccurate.
That Seward County taskforce submitted “challenge after challenge after challenge” to the maps, resulting in hundreds more locations in their region becoming eligible for funding, said Misty Ahmic, a Seward County commissioner who had prior experience with internet infrastructure projects.
“We sent a mailer to every single county resident, we called multiple county residents, we stopped by, we visited, we went door to door, and then our economic development team actually did a lot of those availability challenges by just doing the work online,” Ahmic said.
Following the challenges, the broadband office published a map of “defined project areas” — essentially the clusters of locations eligible for funding, grouped together to make the areas efficient for internet providers building new infrastructure.
Those internet providers included the Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company, a co-operative based in the small town of Jackson, a few miles west of South Sioux City. Pat McElroy, company CEO, said he saw the BEAD program as a great opportunity to expand existing service areas and add more customers.
The company mapped locations and calculated costs, eventually submitting applications for four different project areas, ones that McElroy believed they had a great chance of being awarded.
But the entire process — challenges, engineering, mapping and meeting federal requirements — dragged on for years. Biden decided not to run for re-election and Donald Trump was re-elected president. Then, in June, a federal agency issued fresh guidance on the broadband program, upending the previous work and drastically changing the fate of both McElroy’s company and residents like the Pooles.
This new guidance prioritized lowering up-front costs, making it less likely that local fiber internet providers would receive federal funding. McElroy’s Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company, which provides only fiber internet, decided to cut their losses and not reapply.
“We were kind of devastated, actually,” McElroy said. “At that point, we walked away.”
The new rules also made it more likely that the federal money would go to “Low Earth Orbit” satellite internet companies, like services offered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Leo. That technology is generally cheaper than fiber — instead of burying miles of fiber-optic lines, they provide internet using a constellation of small satellites that beam internet into homes. The new rules also prioritized another cheap option called “fixed wireless” that operates similar to a cell tower.
Patrick Haggerty, director of the Nebraska Broadband Office, said that all the technologies exceeded the standards required by the law.
“If you come at it from tech-neutrality, and you believe in each of the technologies being competitive with each other, which they are, particularly today and moving forward, then you start to see how it shakes out,” Haggerty said.
But satellite and fixed-wireless options leave rural Nebraskans less satisfied than fiber internet, according to a recent study done by Angela Hollman, a cyber systems professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Experts like Christopher Ali, a Penn State telecommunications professor, cite challenges with those technologies. Low earth satellite internet can struggle when too many people use the service. Fixed wireless signals can be disrupted by trees, buildings or changes in elevation. Fiber is still the best technology, Ali argues, as we head into a future where artificial intelligence and data centers will require more and more bandwidth.
“…(F)iber is the only thing that is guaranteed to be able to handle it,” Ali said. “This is not about today, this is about 20 years from now.”
Despite those concerns, most of the locations in Nebraska to be served by the program will end up with these alternative technologies. Under Nebraska’s final plan, just 9% of the state’s locations will receive fiber internet.
The way Nebraska expects to award the money — or not award it — stands in stark contrast to other states.
Iowa was allocated a similar amount of funding to Nebraska — $415 million compared to Nebraska’s $405 million. If Iowa’s final proposal is approved by the feds, the state will use roughly $220 million of its allocated dollars; Nebraska stands to use a little less than $44 million.
Over half of Iowa’s eligible locations will receive fiber. Some of this discrepancy seems to stem from one decision: After the federal guidance was issued, the Nebraska Broadband Office, unlike Iowa, depended on maps largely reliant on self-reported data from fixed-wireless internet providers. This eliminated the Pooles and many other properties that look like they are served by fixed-wireless providers, according to the maps — except that local advocates involved in the process say some of that mapping information is wrong.
Ahmic, the Seward County commissioner, said that the new maps eliminated locations that her taskforce had fought to get considered for awards earlier in the process.
Before the federal guidance and adjusted map, Seward County had over 1,700 locations eligible for funding. Afterward, it had fewer than 650. The mapping changes around fixed-wireless providers are a significant reason why, Ahmic said.
“Heartbreaking,” Ahmic said. “I mean, why even ask people to provide feedback?”
“It hurts economic development, it hurts agriculture, it really hurts production, it hurts education, it hurts health care, it hurts all of those things,” she said.
After the decision, Ahmic organized an effort in which more than 40 Nebraska counties sent letters criticizing the new plan to elected officials including Pillen, state legislators, U.S. congressmen and U.S. senators.
“Without the ability to review and challenge the information reported by providers, we are not confident that locations now considered ‘served’ are truly receiving the services claimed,” the letter said.
Fischer, through a spokesperson, declined an interview request for this article. But during an October speech at a broadband investment forum, Fischer both complimented the new federal plan and also raised questions about whether its implementation would maximize service in the state.
“Ultimately, I hope to see a more balanced award come, among fiber, fixed wireless and also satellite BEAD awards,” Fischer said.
Haggerty, the Nebraska Broadband Office director, said that throughout the process, his office constantly communicated with lawyers, other state broadband offices, Pillen and internet providers working in Nebraska. With the office primarily responding to federal instructions, he said there was little flexibility to make its own rules.
“I think in hindsight, people are going to look at Nebraska and say Nebraska did it right,” Haggerty said.
