Low earth orbit satellite has a "slim but strategically meaningful portion" of BEAD awards, Quilty Space analyst Kimberly Siversen Burke wrote Friday. SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon Leo combined account for slightly less than 5% of all awarded dollars, or roughly $1 billion, but they cover about 20% of total BEAD locations, she said. It's a mistake to tally BEAD awards by technology "as if they were interchangeable solutions."
Close to two dozen providers notified the FCC last week about possibly or actually having fallen short of Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund (RDOF) deployments that were to be completed by the end of 2025. Several said pole attachment and permitting woes were the hold-up or cited delays tied to the fall 2025 federal government shutdown and changes to the BEAD program. The RDOF notifications involved locations in at least 28 different states.
States meeting their four-year deadline for BEAD construction and service delivery will need strong coordination between government and ISPs, wrote Sophia Bock and Kathryn de Wit of Pew's Broadband Access Initiative on Wednesday. They said federal lawmakers need to be familiar with their state broadband offices’ final BEAD proposals, including any changes made during NTIA's review and approval.
Brandy Reitter, executive director of the Colorado Broadband Office, warned Wednesday that the Trump administration's changes to the BEAD program have delayed deployment in the state by about 18 months. “We would have been able to put shovels in the ground last year,” Reitter said during a Fiber Broadband Association webcast with Gary Bolton, the group's CEO. For people waiting for broadband, “it’s going to be a little while,” especially for satellite service, she said.
Some Trump administration BEAD policies, such as conditioning funding on states not regulating AI, will make the program less effective, the American Enterprise Institute said in one of its tech predictions for 2026. President Donald “Trump’s team is adding its own extra-statutory requirements,” the organization wrote Friday in a blog post. While a market-based AI policy is the best approach, “using broadband subsidies as leverage makes federal oversight arbitrary and will result in less broadband deployment and more wasted taxpayer dollars.”
States will surely get access to at least some non-deployment BEAD funds, though it's not clear what limits will be put on their use, said Fiber Broadband Association CEO Gary Bolton and Kathryn de Wit, director of the Pew Charitable Trust's broadband access initiative, during an FBA webinar Wednesday. Bolton said he's optimistic that the National Institute of Standards and Technology will accelerate its review and approval of states' final BEAD proposals, as NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth told him that the process "will go very, very quickly." NTIA and NIST didn't comment.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Wednesday at CES that the Donald Trump administration's efforts to head off state AI laws are most important for small companies trying to gain a toehold in the AI space. Trump signed an executive order in December that directed NTIA to potentially curtail non-deployment funding from the BEAD program for states that the administration determines have AI laws that are overly burdensome (see 2512110068).
While fiber deployments hit record levels in 2025, the year also presented numerous problems, said Ash Brown, chair of the Fiber Broadband Association board, during the group's webinar Wednesday. Brown spoke with association CEO Gary Bolton, who agreed that 2025 wasn’t easy for the fiber industry. Both said fiber will be critical as AI becomes more a part of daily life.
AT&T has dropped its lawsuit against BBB National Programs' National Advertising Division (see 2510300031), which in turn retracted its claims against AT&T, they said in a joint statement Monday. NAD and AT&T “have amicably resolved their dispute,” they said. AT&T filed a lawsuit in October against the ad watchdog after it sent a cease and desist letter ordering the carrier to stop running ads about T-Mobile’s repeated violations of NAD rules on deceptive ads. NAD accused AT&T of violating agreements that restrict participants in its industry self-regulation efforts from making deceptive statements about NAD rulings. “BBB National Programs no longer takes that position and retracts its cease-and-desist letter in all respects,” NAD’s legal counsel said Friday in a letter to AT&T. The organization “recognizes that AT&T’s statements on T-Mobile were based on publicly available information published by BBB National Programs” and doesn’t oppose networks running AT&T’s commercials based on those statements, it said.
NTIA has approved North Carolina's BEAD final proposal, Gov. Josh Stein (D) said Monday. While the state was allocated $1.53 billion, its final proposal is for more than $300 million in deployment spending, he said. BEAD-funded projects should launch in mid-2026, he said, adding that $670 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding for broadband will bring connectivity to more than 250,000 locations by the end of next year.