BROADBAND NATION EXPO, WASHINGTON, DC – Federal approvals for states’ BEAD plans have finally begun trickling in, but funding still hasn’t arrived. That’s a big problem for broadband offices looking to build out the local workforce ahead of deployments.
State officials have been working hard to suss out what kinds of skills ISPs need and how best to attract and train up new workers, Edyn Rolls, Chief Strategic Officer for the Oklahoma Broadband Office, told attendees Friday.
For instance, Oklahoma State University conducted a nationwide study to identify what areas of the broadband workforce need the biggest boost, she said. GIS mapping and engineering skills would be most in demand, the study found. But state officials have five years to finish their BEAD projects and an engineering degree takes four years to obtain — meaning it'll take almost as long to finish training the workforce as they have to finish the work according to the BEAD timeline. So, figuring out how to align the need with the training required has been a challenge.
A total of 174,800 construction workers and 186,900 technicians will be needed to execute BEAD builds, according to a recent study commissioned by the Workforce Development for the Fiber Broadband Association, noted director Todd Jackson. However, there’s expected to be a shortage of 28,000 workers on the construction side and 30,000 on the technician side between 2025 and 2030.
It’s hard to do anything about the problems Oklahoma’s Broadband Office has found without money, Rolls said.
“We want this to be an economic opportunity for our own people,” she said. “But we are in this interesting position where we’ve identified what the issues are, we just don’t have the funding to figure out how to navigate through it and we don’t have a timeline that is secure enough to be able to provide service providers with a clear picture of what does the future actually look like” so that training efforts can be coordinated with cash flow.
Peter Voderberg, Chief of BroadbandOhio, highlighted the same issue. While the state has partnered with ISPs on training programs – a collaboration which he said has been hugely helpful in finding trainers and equipment – some of those who complete the course might not have a place to go yet.
“We are in a situation right now where we’ve done a really good job standing all of this up, and for the first time this quarter we’re seeing a slowdown in hiring because we don’t have the BEAD money out the door,” he said. In Ohio’s case, officials are hoping an injection of Capital Projects Fund money will help them “weather the storm.”
Tough timelines
But as Rolls pointed out, it’s unclear when the drought will break. During Broadband Nation Expo, states have given wildly varying timelines for when they expect to award funds to subgrantees. For some, they expect projects to begin in the summer of 2025. For others, timelines stretch to 2026 and beyond.
And permitting could become a major snarl for those looking to pick up the pace.
“When we talk about things that we’re worried about in the state of Ohio, at the beginning of this year, we had a single company that was working on broadband projects that had 155,000 outstanding pole replacement permits that were over two years old,” Voderberg said. “The reason that was is because we didn’t have enough people to go do pole replacements. We also don’t have enough people to go do locates.”
And that’s just permitting on the local level. For states like Oklahoma, which has a large amount of federal-owned land, federal permits loom large.
“We know the permitting process is going to be very arduous,” Rolls said. She noted she recently spoke with an NTIA official who told her that “on the NEPA side alone, it’s going to be 7-8 months even if you have no environmental study that needs to be done.”
“So, when we say it’s really going to be 2026, it’s really going to be 2026, and that’s only for the ones that are easily obtainable,” she said.
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