From Fiber to Fabric Only Works if BEAD Fixes Its Delivery Model

Commentary on Eric Bathras: From Fiber to Fabric, the Next Evolution of BEAD

By Bhavin Gandecha

Eric Bathras has put forward an idea worth paying attention to. He is calling for the next stage of the federal broadband effort to move beyond single purpose builds and into what he describes as a shared digital fabric, with fibre routes, towers, rights of way, and coordination platforms working together to serve many public needs at once. The case is strong on its own merits. What I want to add is the part of the picture that does not get enough airtime, which is that the idea will only succeed if the way BEAD is actually run on the ground is rebuilt at the same time. Without that, a smarter vision will quietly run into the same wall that has slowed the program so far.

Most of the trouble with large federal infrastructure programs is not that they were aimed at the wrong target. The trouble is that the path between the policy goal and the finished work is full of small frictions that nobody wants to talk about. Permits take longer than anyone planned. Skilled crews are in short supply. Deadlines arrive faster than the work can keep up with. Planning is divided across offices that do not always speak to each other. When people are under that kind of pressure, they tend to pick the safest and narrowest option in front of them, even when a wider and more useful option is sitting in plain view. The fabric idea is, in plain terms, that wider option. If we want it to be picked, we have to make it easier to pick.

The Ambition Is Sound

What Bathras is proposing fits the moment. The country is in the middle of the biggest federal investment in connectivity in a generation, and the choices being made now will shape what is possible for the next ten to twenty years. Building each fibre run as a single use asset, in isolation from the surrounding network of roads, towers, buildings, and public services, is a way of locking in narrow value at a time when much broader value is within reach. Building once, in a way that supports broadband, transportation, public safety, healthcare access, and the coming wave of AI driven services, is a far better use of public money.

Maryland is useful as a real life example because it is not theoretical. The state has set up a coordination group that pulls in agencies that would otherwise plan in isolation. It has built a single map of state owned infrastructure so that everyone is working from the same picture. It has put in place a decision process that asks whether each new investment can serve more than one purpose at the same time. Where that approach has been tried, the results are visible and concrete. Towers that used to sit idle now produce revenue. Fibre routes that used to be planned by one agency now serve four. New connections that used to take months now take days. The case is not abstract, and that is what gives Bathras's argument weight.

The Real Problem Is Below the Surface

Where I would push the conversation further is around what happens when this idea meets the operating reality of BEAD in most states. Federal reviews of the program have already pointed to the same set of problems. Deployment timelines that do not fit the construction seasons in certain regions. Permitting steps that can take a year or more before any work begins. Environmental reviews that consume months. State broadband offices that are short of the staff needed to run the work at the pace the program expects. Guidance from federal agencies that has, in some periods, arrived late or shifted in ways that forced states to redo their plans.

These are not exotic problems. They are the everyday friction of getting public infrastructure built, and they affect any deployment model. The point is that they affect a shared fabric model more, not less, because that model needs more parties to agree, more agencies to align, and more coordination steps to clear before the first shovel goes into the ground. If the underlying delivery model is already struggling with single purpose builds, asking it to carry a more ambitious target without fixing the friction first will simply move the failure point a little further down the road.

The Quiet Cost of Playing It Safe

There is a particular failure pattern that I want to name clearly, because it is easy to miss. When a program is run under tight clocks and complex rules, the rational move for any state or provider is to make each award as clean and simple as possible. Get the grant approved. Get the work signed off. Move on. That is sensible behaviour given the pressure, but it has a cost that does not show up in any single report. Over time, the country ends up with a set of technically sound but poorly connected investments, each one solving a small problem and none of them adding up to the larger platform that the policy was supposed to create.

Bathras is arguing against this drift. He is saying that residual BEAD funds should be allowed to flow into middle mile capacity, shared use assets, planning platforms, and corridor based strategies, because those are the kinds of investments that reduce the number of times the same problem has to be solved separately in different places. That is a sharp insight, and it deserves to be picked up by federal policy rather than left as a state level experiment. Coordinated infrastructure is not only cheaper in the long run. It is also easier to keep working when something goes wrong, because the system around any single asset is stronger and more aware of itself.

For internet service providers, the same point applies from a different angle. When planning is broken up into many small grant decisions with tight rules and short windows, smaller providers can be priced out of the process simply because they cannot afford the administrative overhead. The result is less competition, higher costs, and a narrower set of partners willing to take on the harder rural builds. Fixing the delivery model is therefore not just good for governance. It is good for the market that the program depends on.

What Should Actually Change

The direction Bathras points to on the remaining BEAD funds is the right one. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration should set out clearly that states can use those funds on the foundations of a shared system, including middle mile networks, multi use corridors, and planning tools that improve visibility across agencies. That part of the conversation is mostly an eligibility question, and it can be settled with clear federal guidance and matching support from Congress.

But the more important change is to the way the program is run day to day. Deadlines need to be sequenced so that the long lead steps, permitting and right of way work in particular, can begin earlier in the process rather than being squeezed against the end. Technical guidance needs to be consistent, so that states are not forced to redesign their proposals each time a federal interpretation shifts. State broadband offices need to be funded and staffed to a level that matches the scale of work being asked of them. And the program needs to expect, in writing, that every award contributes to a reusable inventory of infrastructure that the next round of work can build on.

That last point matters more than it sounds. The most common waste in public infrastructure is not the money spent on a build that does not work. It is the money spent on the next build because the first one was not documented well enough for anyone to use it. A program that requires its outputs to be visible, mapped, and available for reuse will quietly save more in the long run than any individual policy change.

Closing

The simplest way to put my view is this. Keep the long horizon that Bathras is asking for, and rebuild the day to day operating model that the program runs on. A future ready policy that is delivered through a slow and fragmented process will keep producing narrower outcomes than the law actually intended. A more modest policy delivered through a fast and well coordinated process can do more good than its budget suggests. The fabric idea is worth fighting for, but fighting for it means fixing the parts of the delivery system that nobody finds exciting to talk about.

The country has a real opportunity in front of it, and a real risk of missing it. The opportunity is to leave behind a network that supports the public for decades. The risk is to spend a great deal of money and end up with a set of separate builds that age into the same problem we are trying to solve now. Which of those outcomes wins depends less on the slogans we choose and more on the patient, careful work of fixing how the program is actually run. That is the conversation I would like to see take centre stage next.