Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo offered insight during a Senate hearing into when the NTIA might award Middle Mile grant funding.

"We are working so hard to get the Middle Mile money out by the end of June. That would be my goal," said Raimondo.

The remarks came Wednesday afternoon during a Senate appropriations hearing on the Commerce Department's 2024 budget estimations, in response to a question from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) about the $1 billion Middle Mile grant program's deployment.

Reached for comment by Light Reading, the NTIA confirmed through a spokesperson that they are "targeting Spring 2023 to announce the Middle Mile grants."

The $1 billion Middle Mile grant program – passed as part of the $65 billion suite of broadband funding programs in the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and operated by the NTIA – opened for grant applications last year. In October 2022, the NTIA announced it received over 235 applications requesting a total of more than $5.5 billion for the $1 billion program.

Figure 1: (Source: Pixabay)

"The volume of applications we received demonstrates the high demand for increasing middle mile capacity throughout the country," said NTIA Assistant Secretary Alan Davidson at the time.

Indeed, while the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is the behemoth of the federal broadband programs, many in the industry have expressed concern about the need for more middle mile funding – particularly in the rural US – to make the last-mile deployments created by BEAD possible and sustainable.

"I think ultimately some focused legislation on this topic is going to be necessary to address the areas where there has been a market failure," said Brent Legg, executive vice president of government affairs at Connected Nation, in a conversation with Light Reading for The Divide podcast. Connected Nation is one of many applicants awaiting word on its own Middle Mile grant applications. The group, in partnership with entrepreneur and investor Hunter Newby, is working to build and operate 125 new carrier-neutral Internet exchange points (IXPs), and applied for NTIA Middle Mile grants to fund five of those projects.

"Most public policy in this country has focused on last-mile buildouts," said Legg. "There are still going to be facilities that are needed that don't get built under a program even as large as BEAD."

All eyes on June

Middle Mile grants were anticipated to start rolling out "no earlier than 3/1," according to the timeline originally set out by the NTIA for the program. Some in the industry expected to start seeing awards in March, but the department did not initially give a specific date.

If the timeline of having grants out "by the end of June" holds up, Middle Mile grants will finish being distributed around the same time NTIA is expected to make state and territory funding allocations for the BEAD program, on June 30.

BEAD allocations are set to follow the FCC's release of the updated version of its national broadband map this spring, which FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has said "more closely reflects the state of connectivity on the ground" and will address "most, if not all" concerns stakeholders have with the existing version of the map.

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— Nicole Ferraro, editor, Light Reading, and host of "​​The Divide" on the Light Reading Podcast.