Gary Bolton, CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA), isn’t too worried about delays caused by new guidelines for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Development (BEAD) funding program. Why? Bolton believes private capital expenditure (CapEx) investments are keeping the fiber industry going strong.
In an interview with Telecompetitor last week, Bolton discussed the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the BEAD Program, and the state of the fiber broadband industry.
Regarding the OBBBA, Bolton said that — while he doesn’t have a comment on the bill in its entirety — he is “enthusiastic because it’s about $4 to $5 billion of incremental CapEx.” Bolton explained the amount more thoroughly in a recent FBA newsletter post.
“The administration has put in incentives like bonus appreciation, and that really favors fiber,” he said. “That’s going to free up a lot of cash flow, and we anticipate somewhere between 15% to 20% of that free cash flow by ISPs will be put into fiber CapEx.”
Bolton said the theme of the FBA Fiber Connect 2025 conference was private CapEx and reiterated points from his Fiber Connect opening keynote about the number of fiber connections various providers have created or have pledged to create in recent years.
Bolton cited a statistic he had just read saying that, in the first half of 2025, there has already been more infrastructure investment ($134 billion so far) than in all of 2024 ($111 billion).
The BEAD Program “money will get deployed for 2026, and we are going to see record investment,” Bolton said, but his point was that money is already flowing toward fiber.
The reason for this private investment, he believes, is that providers realize fiber is the path to loyal customers who take a variety of services.
“Wall Street says first to fiber wins,” Bolton said. “The broadband [provider that is] first to fiber wins the mobile customer. You’re going to win more customers, you’re going to win the market, it’s going to significantly reduce your OpEx [operating expenditure], and then it’s
also going to reduce churn…. Once you have that broadband subscriber, you get the other services that subscriber might want, such as wireless.”
With the worldwide increase in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), Bolton believes fiber connections will be uniquely suited to handle “this quantum leap in innovation and technology.”
BEAD and the Future of Fiber
In early June, Bolton issued a statement after the revised BEAD guidelines were released, suggesting the outlook for fiber was still bright. At the time, it was surprising that the head of the FBA was seemingly untroubled by the technology-neutral stance of the new guidelines, and we asked him about that last week.
“Well, let’s look at what the notice really did,” Bolton said. “It streamlined a lot of things — there were a lot of non-statutory requirements that were kind of bogging things down. So those are removed.”
“The part we’ve been frustrated about,” he conceded, “is that about 17 states should have approved final proposals by now. There are a lot of states ready to go, so [with the new guidance] everybody’s sitting on the sidelines.”
Bolton said that, while the industry “missed a build season,” he isn’t worried about the future of fiber under BEAD. He believes the guidelines’ definition of a priority broadband project still favors fiber.
“For priority broadband projects, you have to be able to provide broadband service that meets the speed, latency, reliability, consistency, quality of service, and related criteria. [The guidelines] ensure the network built by the project can easily scale to speeds over time. It must meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses and support the deployment of 5G and successor wireless technologies and advanced services.
“To be able to provide the critical infrastructure for 5G, 6G, quantum networking, and AI and all that stuff, fiber still is the only thing that qualifies,” Bolton said.
BEAD applicants must demonstrate they can meet the NTIA’s scalability requirements. “It is possible to design a fixed wireless network or an unlicensed wireless network, or two cans and a string that can meet them. But you get more risky with two cans and a string — you’d better have a whole lot of network engineering proof to qualify. But fiber’s a no-brainer.”
Bolton believes fiber is a known and trusted technology that automatically “ticks a box,” as opposed to other technologies that require proof of their capabilities.
As for satellite broadband, Bolton is skeptical of its potential. “Spectrum is a finite resource,” he said. “With Starlink, for example, they can’t add any more capacity into their satellites because the long pole in the tent is spectrum. Until you get more spectrum, [satellite providers] are all sucking from the same spectrum straw.”
The Challenges to Come
The release of the new BEAD guidelines means that states are back on the same timeline. Bolton believes this will raise two primary challenges: meeting supply chain demands for raw materials and the needs of the fiber broadband workforce.
Bolton described the new timeline as a golf course that is full because everyone started on the first hole at the same time. Regarding the supply chain, he said, “I think our industry’s been through enough cycles that we can figure that out.”
The broadband workforce has been a concern for some time, which is why the FBA started its Optical Telecom Installer Certification (OpTIC Path) program. But the concern has grown since the Trump administration put a pause on non-deployment funds.
“How are we going to get enough labor?” Bolton asked. “About 66% to 72% of the cost of deploying fiber is labor. Whether you’re putting it on an aerial or plowing into the ground, it’s construction. So, we’ll have to work through that.”
“The good news,” Bolton said, “is that private CapEx has kept the machine going. We’ve been really fortunate to have a very robust CapEx environment.”
