The NEK Broadband offices and warehouse in Danville on Sept. 3, 2025. File hoto by Glenn Russell/VTDigger Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger. Vermont will receive about $93 million in federal funding to continue constructing its broadband intern et network in some of the state’s most remote rural areas, officials said Tuesday.  The new resources will allow high-speed internet connections to reach over 99% of Vermonters, according to Vermont Community Broadband Board Executive Director Christine Hallquist. READ MORE The funds are long-awaited. The Broadband Board finalized its successful application for the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program in December, after the Trump administration imposed new requirements on participating states last summer. Having originally been allocated nearly $229 million from the program under the Biden administration in 2023, the state will now be able to put some of that funding to use, while the rest of the grant remains up in the air. Combined with state and private matching funds, the board’s approved plan constitutes a $162 million investment in Vermont broadband services. By far the largest award from Vermont’s pot of money will go to NEKCV, a municipal fiber optic internet provider serving the Northeast Kingdom and parts of central Vermont. “We had 50% of the unserved addresses in this BEAD project,” said NEKCV Executive Director Christa Shute, calling the funds “absolutely critical.” “This will get our district to universal service,” she added. Republican Gov. Phil Scott said in a press conference Wednesday that he had “talked to (federal officials) about the Northeast Kingdom and … why broadband was important to that region of the state.”  The broadband board will continue to plan for the remainder of Vermont’s funding, which would be less focused on construction of actual infrastructure and more on surrounding issues like “preparing the workforce for the next level of the digital economy,” Hallquist said.  But federal guidance around the timeline of and uses for that funding remain unclear. “I think we’re pretty confident that we’ll get it,” the board’s Director of Broadband Projects Alexei Monsarrat said of the remaining BEAD funds. “It’s a question of what we can do with it.” Monsarrat said the cost of providing fiber optic internet to some particularly remote areas of the state had been a point of disagreement at times between state and federal officials in the months leading up to the announcement.  Some individual addresses could have cost up to $50,000 each to connect to the fiber optic network, Monsarrat said, which the state always knew was too much. But the role of public money in this project was to help solve what he called a “market failure” for internet services in sparsely populated areas. Originally, states had been able to create their own measures of reasonableness for what they were willing to pay to serve a particular address with fiber optic cables, Monsarrat said. But when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration developed a lower threshold last fall, Vermont officials were required to negotiate and make compromises. “There were certainly some moments where we felt like, you know, it made sense (to provide fiber to an address), and they disagreed,” Monsarrat said. Scott said having spoken with the Trump administration about changes to the broadband program, he’s supportive of the measures federal officials have taken. “I think accountability is something that we should all be asking for,” he added. Currently unserved locations that are too expensive to reach with fiber will instead receive low earth orbit satellite internet; Vermont’s proposal includes a $3 million allocation to Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. About 1,300 addresses are in that category, Hallquist said. Hallquist said the Trump administration informed states last summer that satellite internet must newly be considered equivalent to fiber optic technology, although, she said, “the physics haven’t changed.” Satellite internet is often more expensive for the consumer, and Hallquist previously raised questions about the service’s efficacy in mountainous or tree-dense terrain. “For the Vermonters that ended up with low earth orbit satellite as a solution, they’re probably not going to feel good about it,” she said. But nonetheless, the new funds move the state toward the end of a longstanding endeavor, Hallquist said. “If you look historically, we’ve been working on this for several decades in Vermont,” Hallquist said of the effort to connect rural areas to high-quality internet. Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont receives $93 million in federal funds to expand broadband access. ...read more read less