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.
Published:March 1811:46 am Louisiana expanded internet access through a federal program— now the future is uncertain 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.