#gumbo20 — Public Fediverse posts

A year after its broadband expansion was put on hold, Louisiana gets the go-ahead

Louisiana is one of the first states to gain final re-approval of a federally funded internet deployment plan worth $1.36 billion and serving 127,000 locations. That allocation is a cut from the original plan approved for the state in 2024 in the last days of the Biden administration. 

The original GUMBO 2.0 application was set to cover 140,000 locations, including many of the state’s most remote areas, all with fiber internet. The final proposal instead will cover 13,000 fewer locations. Many other locations will still receive coverage, but from less consistent satellite internet. 

Governor Jeff Landry and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik have tried to sell cuts to the program as a positive by emphasizing cost savings. The state’s new application touts $250 million in savings, which were primarily created by cutting out the most rural residents. 

Any connection that cost more than $8,000 was removed from the fiber internet grants and instead may be covered by improved satellite internet. Some residents, however, will see no improvement at all after years of planning and the original promise of connecting the whole state through fiber internet. 

The federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, which funded the locals’ GUMBO 2.0 program, will still connect twice as many locations as its predecessor, GUMBO 1.0, which was funded in 2021 and is still underway. 

Louisiana was the first state to be approved for a new round of funding — until it was paused by the Trump administration.

Louisiana used federal treasury funding to fund that program. That deployment is now over 80% complete, closing in on the final goal of bringing improved broadband internet to 61,400 locations. 

GUMBO 2.0 is set to cover 127,000 additional locations across the state, including homes, private businesses and public buildings, using 14 different internet service providers, most of them local. 

Many of these companies were part of the deployment of GUMBO 1.0, priming them to get started quickly now that the new round of funding has been approved. 

“With this approval, we can shift from planning to putting shovels in the ground in the next several weeks,” said Veneeth Iyengar, Executive Director of ConnectLA, in a press release on Tuesday.

State announces trimmed-down fiber internet expansion

As of June of this year, Louisiana was one of three states that had already awarded grants for deployment of BEAD, the federal government’s broadband internet deployment program.

Known in the state as GUMBO 2.0, the federal grants were the state’s second wave of fiber internet deployment, set to connect the parts of the state missed by the first round of GUMBO program funding.

However, after months of waiting, the federal government declared all states had to re-award the programs, starting a new 60-day consideration process, in which the state would consider cheaper satellite offers along with fiber cables, including from Elon Musk’s Space X. 

Louisiana was the first state in the nation to have its plans for fiber expansion approved by the feds as part of a Biden era grant program. Now, that approval has been revoked by Trump’s secretary of commerce.

Now that process is nearly wrapped, and the new program is looking to spend $250 million less on internet deployment, with more than $7.5 million awarded to Space X.

While the original GUMBO 2.0 was set to cover 140,000 locations, including many of the state’s most remote areas, the newly drafted proposal is set to cover 13,000 fewer locations, with others still to receive coverage, but from less reliable satellite internet. 

The majority of the new internet deployments now mapped at Connect LA are scheduled for completion by 2030 and over three-fourths were awarded to providers headquartered within the state.