The BEAD fight between satellite and fiber may boil down to 3 words

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has made it very clear that Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grants should focus largely on cost. And the cheapest way to reach unserved areas is via satellite, which costs as little as $349 for Starlink equipment to get up and running. However, state broadband officers have scrutinized the new BEAD rules, and they’ve honed in on three words: “priority broadband project,” which may offer some wiggle room to give awards to other technologies besides satellite. The new BEAD rules have taken away the preference for fiber and instead put the focus on a priority broadband project, which means any technology that:

1. Provides speeds of at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload;
2. Maintains latency of less than 100 ms;
3. Can easily scale over time to meet growing connectivity needs; and
4. Supports deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.

While the speed and latency requirements are straightforward, the language about “scale” and “successor wireless technologies” seems to leave discretion for states to determine whether a technology meets the requirements for BEAD. This wiggle room is important as states decide whether they’ll simply award all BEAD grants to satellite because those are the lowest cost, or whether they’ll argue that satellite won’t scale for the future.