Rural Broadband Gets a Speed Boost: New Grants Require 100/20 Mbps Service and Extend Funding Until 2030

The Community Connect Grant Program Act of 2025 is essentially a major upgrade for federal funding aimed at bringing high-speed internet to rural America. Think of it like taking the old dial-up modem standard and finally replacing it with fiber-optic requirements.

This bill updates the rules for the Community Connect Grant Program, which hands out money for building broadband infrastructure. The main goal is to make sure that when the government funds a new internet connection, it’s actually fast enough for modern life—like streaming 4K video while your kid is on a video call for school.

The New Speed Limit: 100/20 Mbps

The biggest change is setting a much higher standard for the service that grant money must deliver. Under the revised Section 604 of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, any project receiving these grants must now provide a minimum of 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads. This is a huge shift. For context, 100/20 Mbps is the speed needed to run a small business, manage cloud backups, and handle multiple users in a household simultaneously. It ensures that grant money isn't funding yesterday's technology.

Raising the Eligibility Bar

Before a rural area can even apply for this funding, it has to prove it’s underserved. This bill significantly raises the bar for what counts as “underserved.” The minimum speed threshold for an area to qualify for a grant has been bumped up from the outdated 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up to a more realistic 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. If your community already has 25/3 Mbps service, it’s no longer considered underserved enough to compete for these specific funds. This change, while aimed at modernizing standards, could squeeze out some of the most remote or smaller rural areas that might struggle to meet the new 25/3 Mbps minimum, even if their service is still inadequate.

Rural Only, and Here to Stay

The bill also makes two other key tweaks. First, it explicitly restricts the program's focus, replacing the general term “an area” with “a rural area” in the eligibility definition. This locks the focus squarely on rural communities, preventing funds from being diverted to areas that might be sparsely populated but are technically near urban centers. Second, and perhaps most importantly for the program’s stability, it extends the program’s expiration date. The previous reference to 2023 is struck and replaced with 2030, guaranteeing seven more years of federal funding availability for rural broadband expansion.

The Real-World Impact

For a farmer running a modern, data-intensive operation or a remote worker trying to hold down a job in a small town, this bill is good news. It means that when new infrastructure is built with federal dollars, it will actually be capable of handling their needs for the next decade. If you live in a qualifying rural area that currently has slow internet, this bill increases the likelihood that any future project will bring you truly fast service.

The trade-off is that by raising the eligibility bar to 25/3 Mbps, some communities that were barely scraping by with 15/1 Mbps might no longer qualify as “underserved” enough to receive help, even though that speed is still frustratingly slow for a modern family. Overall, though, the legislation pushes the entire rural broadband effort toward higher quality and longer-term relevance, ensuring that federal investments are future-proofed for the next generation of internet use.