Vermont’s broadband push took a step forward Tuesday as federal officials approved funding that the state expects will extend high-speed internet access deeper into remote rural areas. The Vermont Community Broadband Board said it will receive about $93 million through the federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, money officials have described as long-awaited and tied to new federal requirements that arrived last summer.
Broadband Board Executive Director Christine Hallquist said the resources will allow high-speed connections to reach over 99% of Vermonters. She said the money comes after the Broadband Board finalized its application in December, once Vermont met the changed requirements imposed by the Trump administration.
The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program money Vermont originally received under the Biden administration in 2023 totaled nearly $229 million, officials said. With federal guidance around the new requirements leaving parts of the overall grant “up in the air,” the state expects to be able to put some of the allocation to work while planning continues for the remainder.
Alongside the federal award, the board’s approved plan includes state and private matching commitments, which officials said together amount to a $162 million investment in Vermont broadband services. The state’s largest allocation of that investment, officials said, will go to NEKCV, a municipal fiber optic internet provider serving the Northeast Kingdom and parts of central Vermont.
NEKCV Executive Director Christa Shute said the funding is critical for unserved addresses in the BEAD project. She said NEKCV had “50% of the unserved addresses in this BEAD project” and called the funds “absolutely critical,” adding, “This will get our district to universal service.”
Gov. Phil Scott said in a press conference Wednesday that he had spoken with federal officials about the Northeast Kingdom and “why broadband was important to that region of the state.” Scott also said he supported accountability measures connected to the broadband program, telling reporters, “I think accountability is something that we should all be asking for.”
The board said it is also looking ahead to how the remainder of Vermont’s funding will be used, with Hallquist describing an expected shift for later resources toward issues such as workforce preparation for the next level of the digital economy. At the same time, she and other officials said federal guidance on the timeline and uses for remaining money is not yet clear.
Broadband Board’s Director of Broadband Projects Alexei Monsarrat said the state is “pretty confident that we’ll get it,” but that it is “a question of what we can do with it.” Monsarrat said the cost of connecting particularly remote parts of Vermont with fiber created points of disagreement at times between state and federal officials as the plan was finalized.
Monsarrat said individual addresses could have cost up to $50,000 to connect to the fiber network and that Vermont always viewed that cost as too much. He said the state’s approach used public money to address what he described as a “market failure” for internet service in sparsely populated areas, including a shift in the criteria Vermont had to follow after federal officials developed a lower threshold in the fall.
In parts of Vermont where fiber costs remain prohibitive, the plan directs low Earth orbit satellite service instead. Hallquist said Vermont’s proposal includes a $3 million allocation to Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for about 1,300 addresses in that category, and she said satellite service would be treated as equivalent to fiber technology under federal guidance even though, she said, “the physics haven’t changed.”
Hallquist said the tradeoff is that satellite internet can cost consumers more, and she previously raised questions about how effective it would be in mountainous or tree-dense terrain. She said, “For the Vermonters that ended up with low earth orbit satellite as a solution, they’re probably not going to feel good about it,” while adding that the federal funds still move the state closer to ending a decadeslong effort to connect rural communities to high-quality internet. Hallquist said, “If you look historically, we’ve been working on this for several decades in Vermont.”