The Great American Backhoe Bonanza: How Washington’s Fiber Obsession Buried the AI Future, Until Now

For years, Washington bet everything on fiber, spending billions in taxpayer money with the primary purpose of extending fiber cable to every home – all of this with the goal of future-proofing the American internet. It hasn’t worked. Instead, this backhoe bonanza has burned through public funds while leaving the country unprepared for the real shift: the rise of AI applications at the edge.

But that policy just changed.

As reported by WISPA earlier this month, the NTIA issued revised guidance for the $42.5 billion BEAD program. The new rules drop the fiber-first mandate and restore funding eligibility to fixed wireless, satellite, and other technologies that can meet performance requirements. It’s a return to technological neutrality, and long overdue.

You can’t run fiber to every tractor, drone, sensor, or robot. You can’t trench to every warehouse or pole. But with midband spectrum like CBRS, local businesses, utilities, and municipalities can deploy private LTE and 5G networks on their own terms using tools like Rapid5GS. The hardware is affordable. The software is open. The performance is real.

And now, with BEAD dollars finally available to support these kind of connectivity deployments, the wireless “edge mile” can scale.

This shift matters. It means states can revisit flawed proposals that locked out wireless. It means funds can go to providers who can actually solve the far more important edge mile connectivity challenge – a critical national security priority in light of A.I applications making these kind of connections more important than ever before . It means faster deployment, better coverage, and more local control.

The edge economy is here. Agriculture, logistics, defense, energy, and manufacturing all depend on distributed, intelligent systems in places fiber will never reach. For those building that future, this policy change is the green light we’ve been waiting for.

Fiber still has a role. But the era of fiber-to-every-door as national policy is over. Today, it’s about connecting the edge – and doing so quickly, securely, and affordably. Wireless is how we build the future of American connectivity.

The backhoe bonanza is over. The AI-powered edge starts now! Wireless isn’t the fallback anymore. It’s the foundation, and WISPs will lead the way in this next chapter of America’s connectivity story.