Jeff Brooks of the North Carolina Department of Information Technology told a joint meeting of the Caswell County Board of Commissioners and the Board of Education on Jan. 13 that federal and state broadband programs are driving a large wave of rural deployment in the state and that Caswell County has received significant, but incomplete, coverage awards.

Brooks said the way funding is distributed has shifted from census-block estimates to address-level determinations and described major federal programs that have shaped recent work, including the Regional Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and USDA Reconnect, and the federal BEAD effort. He said states and the federal government now classify service on a per-address basis: if an address can obtain the program standard (most recently moving toward 100 megabits per second down and 100 megabits per second up), that location is treated as served and is not eligible for subsidy.

“Right now, out of the programs we administer, we funded 2,301 locations in Caswell County — total investment of about $10,700,000,” Brooks said. He said an additional set of awards will fund roughly 200–270 more locations in the county; of those, Brooks said about 135 addresses were designated for fiber and about 135 for satellite service, and he identified six Starlink awards with the remainder assigned to Amazon’s service.

Brooks cautioned that satellite service and fiber present different tradeoffs. He said satellite installations are often self-install kits and that monthly recurring charges for some low-Earth-orbit satellite offerings can be “roughly double what the fiber providers charge,” raising affordability concerns for low-income households. He also warned that satellite performance can be impaired by tree cover and local topography.

On timing, Brooks described program windows and build-out requirements: some federal awards require multi-year build schedules (for example, RDOF had a six-year build window; other programs have five-year windows). He urged county staff and residents to file inquiries and to share contact information so state staff can follow up with providers and help bring additional addresses into subsidy eligibility before program deadlines.

Board members and residents raised local coverage problems on named roads and asked how to register outages or coverage gaps. Brooks offered to take contact information and to escalate cases to providers and said the state’s mapping data are refreshed biannually.

Brooks also described state-level programs and how matching requirements and ARPA funding shaped award participation. He said North Carolina provided several competitive grant rounds and then launched three state programs (the completing access program, a stopgap program, and a pole replacement program) to address remaining unserved locations.

Brooks concluded by encouraging local providers to bid on stopgap projects (application window cited as closing Jan. 26), reminding the boards that awards must be constructed by the end of the calendar year, and offering to send maps and a packet of information by email to attendees.

Provenance: The article summarizes Brooks’s presentation and Q&A to the joint meeting (topic introduced in SEG 028; discussion and county-level metrics described through SEG 592).