Earlier this month, Brightspeed, the third-largest fiber broadband builder in the United States, announced it had received $528,162,466.97 in federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program funding in 17 states. This is a significant boost for the company's mission to bring high-speed internet to underserved rural communities.
The latest states to announce BEAD funding include Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and South Carolina, where Brightspeed received $181,064,376 in funding to cover an additional 90,852 homes and businesses with its gigabit-speed Brightspeed fiber internet network.
Brightspeed has invested billions of dollars to deploy next-generation fiber to more than 5 million homes and businesses in 20 states. The company's fiber network currently covers more than 2.5 million locations within its service area, with thousands of new locations being covered each month. In addition to Brightspeed's own investments, the company has received BEAD program funding in each of the following states:
In addition to the BEAD Program funding, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin have awarded Brightspeed nearly $294.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to augment the company's hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in fiber network deployments in those states. The ARPA funding will enable more than 140,000 Americans in these 13 states to gain access to high-speed connectivity that they currently lack.