When surveyors talk about ground truth, they mean the thing you can only learn by standing on the spot. The map says one thing. The satellite says another. Ground truth is what is actually there when you walk out and look, and it is the only measure that settles an argument.
I have spent the past several months trying to establish the ground truth of a fibre-optic network, and the reported version of what I found is now with my editors at Rappahannock News. I am not going to front-run it here. Foothills Forum paid for that reporting, so the paper will run it first. This is background — the parts that belong to the country rather than the county, much of which will not appear in the piece.
Since I wrote Miles from Nowhere in the spring, a few things have happened.
In 2022 and 2023, RiverStreet Networks was contracted to bring internet to more than fourteen thousand homes across Patrick, Henry and Franklin counties in Southside Virginia. On July 16, Cardinal News reported the company had completed forty of them: twenty-nine in Franklin, eleven in Henry, none at all in Patrick. It is one of two RiverStreet contracts now unravelling — the other, further east, covers nearly twice as many homes across six more counties — leaving more than 30,000 Virginians still waiting. RiverStreet told the state’s broadband office it couldn’t raise the money to finish. Virginia’s Office of Broadband determined it was incapable of completing the work and stripped it of its contracts.
I can’t find an earlier instance of the State of Virginia doing this, so it’s worth understanding what it took. And it doesn’t seem to have been four years of missed milestones — those have been in plain sight since 2024. Running out of money is likely what finally moved the state. Underperformance is eminently survivable; but insolvency is not. In the eight-county project I spent the spring reporting on, the state handed its provider a rescope and a fresh set of milestones while declining, with verbiage akin to interpretive dance, to call any of it a corrective action plan — going so far as to confirm in writing that no provider funded by VATI (the state grant programme that expands last-mile broadband into unserved rural areas) is currently on one. So the moral of RiverStreet is this: go broke and the state will act, but fail at length, and it will look the other way.
The pandemic money behind these builds — $750 million of it in Virginia — has to be spent by December 31 or returned to Washington. The state has already pushed these projects’ completion date once, from June 30 to December 31.
In the meantime, the U.S. Treasury has given notice that it might push the federal deadline to the end of June 2027. There are two catches. The first: the extension covers only delays caused by permitting, supply chains, labour or weather — not by the provider — so the lifeline may be out of reach of the very companies flailing for it. The second: the potential extension only applies to projects funded from the Capital Projects Fund. Many of these builds — including, as it happens, the eight-county one I spent the spring reporting on — draw from the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, whose December deadline Congress fixed in statute and Treasury cannot move. West Piedmont, the district sweeping up after RiverStreet, has asked anyway. Whether a build its contractor walked away from counts as delayed by bad luck or by bad contractor will be a matter of interpretation.
I don’t know what to make of this, and I’m hesitant to succumb to my instincts. An extension is good for the eight thousand locations in Patrick County that have no fibre and now have no provider either. But it isn’t the first time this work has been given more room, and every previous extension was justified by a reason at least as sound as this one. At the end of the day, deadlines that keep moving are not deadlines, but aspirations with a calendar attached.
In June last year, the federal government rewrote the rules of the $42.45 billion national broadband programme, stripped out its preference for fibre, and let satellite compete on equal terms. Satellite providers — Starlink chief among them — had been set to collect more than $1 billion of it, a figure the government began paring back this month.
Fibre is the better product by a distance — it doesn’t care about weather or trees or how many neighbours are streaming, and it lasts decades. It is also slow and ruinously expensive to lay across country where the houses are miles apart, which is precisely the country these programmes exist to reach. A dish goes up in an afternoon.
Nobody seems to want to say aloud that there are now two in a race, and the delay is the referee. Every month the fibre does not arrive, the case for it gets weaker, because the people it was meant for have made other arrangements. I’ve sat in my neighbours’ home office using their satellite internet literally watching the ground being surveyed for a network that was funded before the pandemic ended.
In December 2024, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), the General Assembly’s oversight arm, published a review of Virginia’s broadband deployment. It found that make-ready disputes over utility poles were delaying at least sixteen of the fifty-seven projects then under way, and that twenty-nine of those fifty-seven had already missed their original deadlines. Nine projects, begun in 2022, had not connected a single location.
JLARC also found the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) had not consistently required either localities or ISPs to complete corrective action plans when projects missed key milestones.
Its recommendations were specific — by July 2025, determine which projects would not finish by the deadline and require the localities holding them to act, including by handing the work to somebody else. It also discouraged awarding new funding to providers with a recent history of underperformance.
That was a year and a half ago. The eight-county project in my own corner of Virginia — the Northern Shenandoah Valley — is one of those the commission was describing. I spent the spring reporting on the project and the company, All Points Broadband, behind the build. All Points is controlled by Searchlight Capital Partners, a private-equity firm that manages some $15 billion.
The firm’s co-founder, Eric Zinterhofer, is married to Aerin Lauder, a daughter of the cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder. Aerin’s sister, Jane, is married to Kevin Warsh — who, since May, is the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Among Searchlight’s partners is Ajit Pai, who ran the Federal Communications Commission under Donald Trump, left the agency the day Joe Biden was inaugurated, joined Searchlight that spring, and today also serves as chief executive of CTIA, the wireless industry’s principal lobby.
The timeline alongside all this is interesting. The pandemic broadband billions passed into law in March 2021. Pai left the FCC and joined the firm within months. That July, Searchlight invested in All Points, a small rural provider that had already begun collecting government broadband grants. By December, All Points had the $96 million state grant to wire eight Virginia counties. Four years later, four homes in one of them have working internet.
And then there is BEAD — the newer, $42.45 billion federal broadband programme. Virginia handed All Points its largest award yet: $171.3 million to wire 19,801 more locations across much the same ground where it has so conspicuously underdelivered. The recommendation came from the same broadband office, and the contracts are being finalised now.
When set against what the company has delivered to date, it’s rather vexing. Starting with a $61 million project in Loudoun County where All Points connected just over one hundred homes. In Culpeper, the county actually terminated its contract with the firm altogether. Months after that termination, the same broadband office recommended All Points for the largest broadband cheque in the state. I asked how the state got comfortable with that, and the answer was that All Points had done well in the easy places — the small, dense eastern counties where it had finished — so why not trust it with the hard ones — basically, a company being rewarded, at scale, for the parts of the map that were never the problem.
I cannot tell you that any of the company’s connections did anything. A Fed chairman has no say over a rural broadband grant in Virginia, and I have no evidence that any of these people lifted a finger on All Points’ behalf. Nothing I found suggests a law was broken. But, here’s the ground truth. A great deal of public money — federal, state and local, and in the counties that also chipped in, private donations — is flowing to a company insulated by the kind of wealth and proximity to power that most of the people still waiting for internet will never get near. Which makes the thing that actually went wrong — a state that will move when a company goes broke but not when it merely fails, for years, in plain sight — harder to discount as run-of-the-mill incompetence, rather than a set of incentives working as they should.
Maybe that’s just how infrastructure gets financed these days, and the proximity is coincidence and the delay just a delay.
My reported piece will run in Rappahannock News. It is about four years, eight counties, and a question that turned out to be much harder to answer than it should have been. I will link it here when it is up.
An impressive deep dive into what appears to be a shallow pool of competence, watered by taxpayer dollars!