FOR BEAD GRANTEES
 

You won the award. Now you need an operation.

AEX is the operational backbone for BEAD-funded builds: the Internet Exchange, the backbone, the NOC, the helpdesk and the equipment, available now, in your footprint. 

$42bn 
flowing to rural and underserved broadband

52  
states and territories with award agreements

14
states AEX already operates in

The clock starts when the award is granted.

BEAD funding comes with a build timeline attached, not an open runway. Most grantees are strong on the things that got them the award: the footprint, the community relationships, the construction plan. What's missing is the operational layer nobody budgets for until it's overdue.

The Situation

Most grantees have the funding, the footprint, and the community relationships. What they do not have is a BNG, IP transit, a 24-hour NOC, a subscriber helpdesk, or the engineers to run any of it. 

The Answer

That is precisely the layer AEX provides, and the operational half of it is available today. We already operate across 14 states, so in most footprints you are not starting from zero: you plug into infrastructure that exists. 

 

The real constraint is not capability. It is permission.

A majority of operators polled said they'd allow an agent to diagnose but not to act, and most of the rest wanted human approval before any change. That's the right instinct: a confidently wrong recommendation is a nuisance in a chat window and an outage on a network. So we designed for it rather than around it.

AVAILABLE NOW
 

Operational Infrastructure

  • Internet Exchange: BNG, IP addressing, IP breakout and CGNAT as a managed service

  • Middle-mile backhaul from your PoPs to our backbone and a national IX

  • 24/7/365 NOC with Tier-2/3 engineering and direct OEM escalation

  • White-label subscriber helpdesk under your brand

  • Equipment procurement, staging, deployment, and commissioning 

AS YOU MATURE
 

The full lifecycle, when ready

  • AEX Software for subscriber management, billing, GIS, and zero-touch provisioning

  • AEX Field Service for your installation and maintenance crews

  • Add either independently, on your own timeline, not as a bundled requirement

Who is this for?

BEAD grantees at any stage, rural electric cooperatives entering broadband for the first time, municipal and community broadband operators, and developers building MDU or planned-community networks. 

PROOF
 

This is not theoretical. Ripple Fiber started with no operational infrastructure and grew to a 10-state operator on this model. We already manage 300+ PoP locations for operators running live networks.

Plug into infrastructure that already exists.