More than 20 percent of BEAD locations will go to satellite

After all the hand-wringing about the revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program under the Trump administration, it looks like about 67.1 percent of eligible locations will get fiber, while 20.5 percent will receive low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite connections. The remaining locations will receive fixed wireless access (10%) and coaxial cable (2.4%). Many people in the fiber industry have been disappointed that so many BEAD grants have gone to LEO. But the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) notes that there has been a lot of private investment in fiber over the four years since the BEAD program began. According to the FBA, the fiber industry addressed 11 million of the 15.2 million unserved and underserved locations that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act intended to connect, leaving only about 4.2 million BEAD locations. Now, 20.5 percent of those final BEAD locations will go to the satellite operators SpaceX and Amazon Kuiper.