BEAD could boost the enterprise value of top US telecoms by $17 billion

There are still lots of unanswered questions about the true benefit the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program will bestow upon some of the nation's top broadband providers. But a "rough, preliminary estimate" from New Street Research indicates the BEAD opportunity stands to beef up their combined enterprise values by billions of dollars. New Street Research employed a multi-step model to calculate the number of served and unserved homes that can qualify for BEAD subsidies. Based on its model, New Street Research believes that BEAD could boost the enterprise value of AT&T, Consolidated Communications, Frontier Communications, Lumen+Brightspeed, and Verizon by a combined $17 billion, or 7%. Boiled down further, New Street Research estimates that those companies will be worth about $263 billion when they complete their current self-funded upgrades, and that this value could climb to $279 billion when the eligible BEAD markets are added.