National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) — BEAD Program

Built World

54 of 56 state and territory final proposals approved; program entering active construction phase; soliciting public input on $21 billion in estimated savings from 2025 program reforms

For two decades, 'fiber to every home' has been promised and postponed. The fiber itself was rarely the bottleneck. The constraint was the gateway hardware—the box on a customer's wall that turns light pulses into Wi-Fi—which stayed too expensive for carriers to hand out free with a service plan. On April 30, 2026, Broadcom announced the chipsets designed to break that constraint: a 10-gigabit passive optical network (PON) gateway system-on-chip and two paired Wi-Fi 8 radios, all engineered for mass-market price points.

Updated May 1