According to CCG Consulting President Doug Dawson, the broadband industry had five major problems in the last year. Today, Dawson published his 2025 list of “broadband turkey awards,” the first list of this kind he’s ever published.
Below are the “dishonorees:”
1. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program Benefit of the Bargain: Dawson said the “Benefit of the Bargain” was misnamed since grants were cut in half during the process, meaning that many consumers and businesses won’t get the broadband internet they were expecting any time soon.
“The award goes equally to whoever came up with the plan to cut the BEAD infrastructure grants in half, and to the person who came up with this dreadful name,” Dawson wrote. Only last week was the final state’s list ofprovisional BEAD awards published (for the Benefit of the Bargain round), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is currently in the process of reviewing and approvingstates’ final proposals.
2. Elimination of digital equity funding. Dawson said that these funds — designed to give people access to computers and other devices to increase their digital literacy — were cut “seemingly because the title of the law included the word ‘equity.’” Dawson said the decision is especially confounding since the government require digital rather than phone communication with various agencies.
3. Amazon LEO receiving BEAD funding. Dawson noted that Amazon LEO is a provider that has yet to serve a single broadband customer and does not have a broadband infrastructure. “This might eventually turn out not to be a disaster,” Dawson wrote, “but this has to be one of the oddest things that has ever happened in the industry.”
Speaking of broadband turkeys, it should be noted that Amazon Leo announced a preview phase just before Thanksgiving.
4. Legislative spectrum policy. Dawson wrote that Congress required that the 800 Mhz mid-range spectrum be set aside for auctions in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” eliminating the deliberative process that considered the needs of different spectrum users. He believes this was the result of the influence of cell phone lobbyists.
“This goes on the turkey award list since the FCC will likely have to raid the spectrum needed for other vital purposes like rural broadband and WiFi,” Dawson wrote.
5. Cloud outages by major providers. Dawson specifically named outages from Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), saying that as these companies continue to add to their dominance in the cloud market, any outage is a huge occurrence. He also pointed out that these firms continue to shrink the number of their core data hubs, so even a small problem is magnified, rather than being contained in a smaller data hub.
