Monthly Archives: August 2025

Flood Sensors and Broadband

I’ve been increasingly hearing about local governments installing flood sensors as a way to alert the public about high-water situations. There seems to be an increasing number of major flooding events in the news, like Hurricane Hellene last year and the Guadalupe River floods earlier this summer.

But there are numerous smaller flooding events all of the time that result from heavy rains. In Appalachia, where I live, and in places like the Ozarks and the Rocky Mountains, floods can spring up quickly along roads after a rain event, often from upstream rain outside the flooded area. Flood sensors are badly needed in some parts of the country.

The danger from local flooding is that roads suddenly go underwater and people drive into the flooded area, particularly at night. I heard from one County that said that residents blindly drive into flooded areas every year. Historically, local governments blocked off roads after local flooding, but doing so is a delayed response after somebody notifies officials that a road is flooded.

The ideal flood sensor system uses a sensor that can detect rising water levels. One company that makes these sensors is HyFi. These sensors can detect rising water before a full flood situation occurs. The ideal flooding system also includes a way to alert the public. In my County, there are text alerts issued when roads flood. The ultimate safety solution is a system that blocks off roads, using technologies like dropping a crossing gate, like those used at railroad tracks. Flood alerts can also use electronic signboards that warn drivers of a flood ahead on a road.

The ideal flood sensor system also includes some kind of broadband connectivity. Local public safety staff want to know when a flood is underway to be able to alert the public. In urban areas with great cell coverage, flood sensors can be connected via cellular technology. But in rural areas, a lot of areas have poor or no cell coverage, and the best solution is to connect flood sensors to a fiber network.

Flood sensor systems are a great safety measure along roads that quickly and routinely flood. It’s a lot harder to develop a flood sensor system that works during catastrophic flooding. In Hurricane Helene, the flooding was so severe that entire roadways and even whole towns were washed away in the floodwaters. Early during the hurricane, the cellular networks went dark after winds affected microwave dishes, and when floods washed away the fiber backbone lines that served all of the ISPs and cell carriers in the region. In areas with the worst flooding, the electric substations were also put out of service. There is a lot of speculation that many who died in the hurricane didn’t get any notice that the floods were of historical proportions.

But catastrophic floods are rare, while smaller floods are routine in some places. Flood sensors, along with the broadband backup, ought to be on the wish list of any locale that routinely floods. A lot of the people who die in floods drive into the rushing waters – something that could be avoided with good flood detection and alert systems.

Charter Sued Over ACP Losses

In recent years, it seems that when there is a sudden drop in the stock price for a publicly traded company, a class action suit will soon follow. In the broadband industry, Charter was recently sued after its stock dropped $70.25 per share on July 25, from a price the day before of $380 per share.

The stock price dropped after Charter announced its earnings results on July 24 for the second quarter of 2025. The class action suit blames the sudden stock price drop on Charter’s misleading statements about the impact of the end of the ACP program. That program provided a $30 subsidy for home broadband for qualifying low-income households. Charter was the most aggressive ISP in the ACP program and had enrolled around 5 million households. When Charter discussed its second quarter results, the company said that it lost 117,000 broadband customers for the quarter, and that 50,000 of  those losses were the residual impact of the end of ACP.

Charter explained that the 50,000 customers it lost were due to households unable to afford monthly payments – something that it believes would not have occurred if ACP were still in place. These weren’t ACP customers, since that plan ended a year earlier, but the customers were similar to those who had been enrolled in ACP.

I did a little digging to look deeper at the facts. I was curious how Charter’s customer losses compared to those of other publicly traded cable companies. The following chart shows the customer performance for each company since the end of 2023.All of the big cable companies are losing customers – something that is a constant headline for the industry. Analysts pin most of these losses on fierce competition from FWA cellular carriers and fiber overbuilders, both of which have been adding customers at a rapid pace over the last two years. The chart shows that Charter has done a better job of minimizing customer losses than all of the other publicly traded cable companies. Over 18 months, Charter lost 2.2% of its 4Q23 customers, a lower percentage drop than the other companies.

The loss of ACP customers wasn’t the only bad news in the Charter earnings release. Charter announced earnings per share of $9.18, up from $8.49 per share a year earlier. But according to stock analysts, the earnings were lower than the expected earnings of over $10 per share. Possibly due to the expectations of higher expected earnings, Charter stock had climbed to a high price of $427.25 on May 16, 2025.

The Charter stock price drop also can’t be blamed on the overall market, because on July 25, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average all rose to near all-time highs for each index.

I am the last person you’d ever ask for stock advice, and big market swings like this are a mystery to me. But still, when looking at the facts, it’s hard to think that a company with 30 million broadband customers would be dinged by an 18% stock price drop due to losing only 50,000 low-income customers. However, that is certainly possible, and I guess a jury will have to eventually figure it out.

When is Network Damage Terrorism?

On July 1, Charter issued a press release that labeled damage to its fiber lines in Van Nuys, California, as domestic terrorism. The company said that thirteen fibers, that included 2,600 individual fibers, were cut. The cuts knocked out critical infrastructure such as emergency services, a U.S. military base, 911 centers, fire and police departments, financial institutions, court buildings, healthcare facilities and hospitals, educational institutions, and cell towers. The cuts affected more than 50,000 residential customers and more than 500 business customers for up to 30 hours.

On July 15, the company issued a second press release talking about a series of fiber cuts in Missouri. Charter, where it experienced 148 outages in the first half of the year, doubling the number of fiber cuts from the previous year.

This is the first time I remember an ISP labeling fiber cuts as domestic terrorism. But there have been clear cases of damage to communications systems that can be chalked up to terrorism. One incident that came to mind was a bomb detonated on Christmas Day in 2020 outside of an AT&T switching center. Electric companies have seen deliberate attacks on infrastructure, such as two substations attacked in Moore County, NC in 2022.

Charter’s announcement raises an interesting question about how to distinguish terrorism from normal damage to telecom infrastructure. There are a lot of incidents of damage to networks. ISPs reported over 5,700 incidents of infrastructure damage in the second half of 2024. A joint report issued by NCTA, CTIA, USTelecom, NTCA, and WIA detailed these incidents. That report says that 1,915 of the 5,700 incidents were cable cuts. A lot of these cuts were accidental or can be chalked up to those who dig without properly locating existing buried facilities. However, the report categorizes eighteen incidents as deliberate sabotage, and there may have been other incidents that should have been categorized the same way.

Charter admits that it’s using the domestic terrorism language to try to get the attention of legislators and law enforcement. There are 28 states today that have created a specific felony for deliberately damaging telecom infrastructure, and Charter would like to see that in more states. The company would also like to see law enforcement prosecute more cases. Charter would also like to see federal legislation address the issue.

Charter got the attention it was seeking. I’ve now seen articles throughout the industry asking if deliberate fiber cuts are domestic terrorism. The FBI opined that the cuts in Van Nuys were more than vandalism, and any industry person can understand that somebody didn’t accidentally cut thirteen different fibers.

After thinking about it, my definition of terrorism is when somebody destroys telecom infrastructure with the specific goal of knocking a lot of people out of service, particularly if the damage is done in a way that takes time to fix. A lot of damage to infrastructure is malicious, but is done for other purposes. For example, a lot of the incidents detailed in the report mentioned earlier were copper thefts. That is clearly criminal activity, but it’s difficult to classify as terrorism. Is it terrorism when somebody shoots at cables hanging on wires? Probably not, and this is just malicious vandalism.

Broadband Usage 2Q 2025

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the second quarter of 2025. OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per household in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the first quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.The average U.S. broadband customer used 71 more downloaded gigabytes and over 7 more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 9.4 billion more gigabytes of data are used each month than a year earlier.

One of the most interesting things about the second quarter this year is that the overall average broadband usage was slightly higher than in the first quarter. Except for the COVID year of 2020, OpenVault has always documented a seasonal drop in usage from the first to second quarter. That’s mostly due to the OpenVault numbers being measured at the end of each quarter, and schools being out in June. But this year, there was no drop off. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and if it represents an unexpected growth of bandwidth usage compared to recent years.

As can be seen in the table above, upload usage has been growing at a faster pace than download usage. In its previous quarterly report, OpenVault credited the 18% growth of upload usage to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses. To put the 7-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading an additional 5 standard definition movie files or 2 high definition movie files every month compared to a year earlier. I think the average household would be surprised by the volume of data they are uploading each month.

This report included something new, and OpenVault looked at the performance nationwide of broadband cable modems. Their findings go a long way towards explaining why a lot of customers complain about broadband performance. OpenVault shows that 13% of all broadband modems are experiencing problems. The report showed that:

  • 47% of modems were critical, meaning they are significantly impaired and don’t work as intended.
  • 95% of all modems experience moderate impairment.
  • 67% of modems have no usage on at least one upload or download channel, meaning degraded performance.
  • 99% of modems were described as flapping, meaning they go in and out of service.

OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • 5% of broadband subscribers now use more than 2 terabytes of data per month.
  • Median broadband speeds are also increasing and were at 431 gigabytes at the end of the second quarter. That means half of homes use less than 431 gigabytes and half of homes use more.

Showdown at the BEAD Corral

The telecommunications industry has not had many instances when a momentous decision could drastically change the industry. The only big one I remember was when Judge Harold Greene issued the landmark ruling in 1982 that resulted in the divestiture of AT&T into multiple local Baby Bells and the remaining AT&T long-distance company. While a small number of insiders knew what was coming, the announcement of the divestiture rocked the industry and drastically changed it going forward.

Rural broadband is facing a similar dramatic moment when the NTIA decides what its going to do with the BEAD proposals that States have presented to it. State Broadband Offices (SBOs) have been submitting final BEAD plans that are still mostly fiber. This seems to fly in the face of NTIA, which changed the rules to give a lot of funding to alternative technologies, meaning satellite and fixed wireless.

A little history is needed to explain why I categorize this as a showdown. In the original NOFO for BEAD, the NTIA clearly stated that its preference was for as much of the BEAD money as possible to go to build fiber. The fiber preference came from wanting to use this once-in-a-generation grant to create long-term broadband networks in rural areas. Over time, the NTIA eased its stance a little and came out with rules to describe how satellite broadband can be used to serve remote locations. But the preference was still to use BEAD for fiber.

The new administration upended the BEAD program. In June, it issued new BEAD guidelines that made it much harder to award money for fiber. The NTIA rules essentially turned the BEAD review process into a one-round reverse auction and said that BEAD funding should go to the ISP that asks for the least amount of grant per location. The only caveat was that the NTIA could consider a second applicant that was within 15% of the cost of the lowest bidder. When the new rules were published, the industry collectively saw it as a fiber killer.

But the new rules had a small loophole. SBOs could designate some BEAD applications as ‘priority broadband projects’, as long as they met three criteria. A proposed technology had to meet the speed, latency, reliability, and consistency criteria established by the BEAD legislation. A proposed technology had to be able to scale over time to meet foreseeable future broadband demand. Finally, a proposed technology had to support the deployment of 5G and other successor technologies.

SBOs have seemingly aggressively used this loophole to disqualify alternative technologies and still award BEAD to fiber projects. It’s not hard to understand how they could do this. For example, there are many articles about how satellite doesn’t always meet the 100/20 Mbps test today, and it’s not hard to set a future speed threshold that satellite can’t guarantee. The third requirement of supporting 5G and future technology deployments can be interpreted to mean deploying fiber backbone networks in rural areas that can support future cell towers. It’s clear that satellite doesn’t meet this requirement, and a fixed access network that only uses microwave backhaul also fails to meet it.

West Virginia issued a Final BEAD Plan for public comment that awards 99% of the state’s BEAD money to fiber to reach 94% of the eligible passings. Virginia proposes to bring fiber to 81% of its eligible passings. Part of the BEAD review process for BEAD is to elicit public comments on the proposed use of the funding. Starlink filed comments in Virginia and Louisiana, aimed at the NTIA, that the States are not adhering to the revised NTIA guidelines that say that funding should go to the lowest bidder.

Even with States still proposing fiber, the new NTIA guidelines have had an impact. Louisiana had completed its BEAD process before the new guidelines. The State originally proposed to bring fiber to 95% of the locations in the state. The NTIA rules required Louisiana to restart the grant process, and in the revised process, the State lowered the allocation to BEAD to 80% of the locations. During the process, fiber ISPs sharpened their pencils and lowered the requested amount of funding.

NTIA now faces a big choice. SBOs (and actually the Governors they work for) have clearly said that they want BEAD money to build fiber. All three of these early states have Republican governors, and as I have always said, broadband is not a partisan issue at the state and local levels.

This is definitely a showdown moment. NTIA can concede to the requests from these States. In doing so, it will have a hard time not doing the same thing for other states, red or blue. Or the NTIA can play the bad cop and tell States to kill most of the proposed grants for fiber.  But perhaps whatever the NTIA decides isn’t the final word since the process now hangs under the threat of lawsuits – perhaps from Starlink, or perhaps from States who lose grant awards aimed at fiber.

Limitations of Federal Broadband Data

Pew Trusts recently published a detailed article that demonstrates the difficulty of analyzing and understanding broadband deployment using existing federal broadband data. Anybody who follows discussions about broadband mapping has heard stories of how broadband mapping data is often still inadequate, but the Pew observation goes far beyond the mapping data.

Pew reports that broadband researchers have identified several important problems that make it difficult to analyze and understand broadband data.

  • Federal data on broadband access, adoption, and household characteristics is often reported by county, ZIP code, or census tract, rather than by household. This lack of standardization of collecting and reporting broadband data makes it impossible to combine different data sets for evaluation.
  • Federal data relies heavily on information provided by internet service providers, which means there are concerns about bias and lack of transparency in the data.
  • Different data sources are inconsistent when defining the data being reported. For example, some sources of federal broadband data don’t denote the broadband technology, making it difficult to correlate network performance and household use of the internet.
  • Current federal data makes it difficult to determine the availability of affordable broadband connections or even how to define affordability. Federal data collection rarely combines broadband prices with other data

The Pew report demonstrates the challenge of understanding federal broadband data by listing fifteen different federal sources of information related to broadband. The list includes the sources most people know about, such as the FCC BDC broadband maps. But there is also broadband data available from NTIA, USAC, USDA, and the U.S. Census.

Pew highlights how the problems with data has likely led to decision-makers making choices with funding programs that misallocated funding. One recent example of this is the BEAD grants, where over the course of a few years, the map of eligible BEAD locations changed drastically. Nobody believes that the final BEAD map is an accurate depiction of homes without good broadband.

Another example of mismatched data was when valid applications for Reconnect grants were rejected when grant applicants defined grant serving areas using specific households, while USDA evaluated the proposed serving areas using hexagons. If any hexagons overlapped a household that had broadband, entire grant applications were invalidated.

Probably the biggest misuse of federal data came from the FCC when it used FCC mapping data provided by ISPs, which everybody in the industry understood to be inadequate, to define the Census blocks that were eligible for RDOF. The resulting Swiss cheese maps of eligible areas are still plaguing all other efforts to close the broadband availability gap.

There is no doubt that incomplete information makes it difficult for lawmakers and regulators to understand the impacts of proposed policies and for government entities to enforce grant recipients’ program requirements. The shortcomings of good federal data has led some states to create their own baseline measurements to try to understand broadband impacts on economic opportunities, access to health care services, education, and workforce development.

The Pew article suggests that fixing some key issues will lead to a more understandable broadband landscape. However, this would require somebody in the federal government to mandate that any data gathering and reporting of broadband data adhere to defined parameters that would make the various data sets compatible. While trying not to sound too pessimistic, this doesn’t seem likely.

AOL Drops Dial-up

In news that will evoke nostalgia for a lot of people, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing dial-up Internet access on September 30. AOL was the poster child of the dial-up Internet era when dial-up was the primary way to get online before the advent of DSL and cable modems in the late 1990s. Anybody who used dial-up can still remember the pings and pongs while the phone made a connection to a dial-up server. People probably remember when AOL would mass-mail diskettes that contained AOL software to attract new customers.

AOL was phenomenally successful in the 1990s. AOL ruled the dial-up industry and reached 34 million dial-up customers at its peak. The company had a lot of ISP competitors like Sprint, EarthLink, NetZero, Prodigy, and a ton of small dial-up ISPs operating in local markets.

But AOL was much more than just a dial-up portal to reach the early web. AOL created the first major platform that included email, news, games, shopping, and a host of other services in one place. AOL was attractive to new users since it gave them the ability to do things without having to search the web. Before platforms like AOL, a user had to be fairly tech-savvy to use the Internet. A lot of users went onto the AOL platform and never strayed elsewhere on the web. Its closest early platform competitor was CompuServe, which grew to about 3 million subscribers and eventually concentrated on serving business people. MSN and other websites eventually tried to duplicate and  compete with AOL.

People remember speeds on AOL and other dial-up ISPs of 56 kbps (kilobits per second). But 56 kbps was only introduced in 1997, and before that, most ISP modems offered speeds of 28.8 kbps or 33.6 kbps. The first DSL modems that brought 1 Mbps speeds that were 18 times faster than dial-up.

AOL stunned the business world on January 10, 2000, when it announced that it would buy Time Warner for $182 billion in stock and debt, the largest corporate merger ever. The purchase was at the height of the early Internet craze, and it was unbelievable that AOL could acquire the company that owned Time Magazine, CNN, and the Warner Brothers studios. AOL wanted access to the Time Warner content as a way to stave off looming competition from other web companies. It’s hard to know if the envisioned synergies could have thrived because in the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash killed AOL’s stock valuation along with other Internet and telco stocks.

AOL and other dial-up ISPs were a major issue for telephone companies because users would stay on dial-up connections for hours or days. Voice switches were not designed to have lines tied up for that long, and telephone companies complained of reaching switch saturation at busy times. A number of telcos tried to block or limit dial-up ISPs, but the courts and the FCC ruled that dial-up was a legitimate use of telephone lines.

You might wonder who still uses dial-up. According to the U.S Census, there were still 175,000 households on dial-up in 2020. The attraction of dial-up is that it is cheap – between $10 and $20 per month for the remaining companies in the business. It’s an attractive option for folks who only want to read email, or for rural folks with no other affordable alternative. Folks who still want dial-up will still have a few other options left, like EarthLink and NetZero.

I used AOL email for many years as my personal email. AOL says that its email service will remain after dial-up dies, but you have to wonder how long they’ll keep that going. Hearing the announcement brought back memories of hearing the AOL pings and the “You’ve Got Mail” greeting, and of using other long-dead services like Netscape and Ask Jeeves.

Monopsony in the Wireless Labor Market

NATE, the Communications Contractors Association, recently sponsored a report by the Brattle Group titled Market Failure in the Wireless Communications Infrastructure Service Industry. The report describes how the three national mobile networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) dominate the labor market for wireless contractors in a way that is undermining the development and retention of the workforce for this critical infrastructure.

The Brattle report calls the situation a monopsony. That is an economic term for a market where a buyer, or a small universe of buyers, has significant market power over vendors who serve the industry. Brattle believes the term applies since the three big cellular carriers collectively control 97% of the cellular market. The contractor market that sells labor to the carriers is comprised of numerous small companies.

The Brattle report describes how the three carriers collectively harm the contractor industry. The three carriers dictate the prices they are willing to pay for service. Contractors complain that the prices offered don’t account for local issues like labor rates, terrain, and weather. 80% of the contractors that responded to a Brattle survey say that prices offered by the carriers don’t cover their costs. The rates don’t cover costs like warehousing of materials, third-party compliance, or training costs for technicians.

The report also shows some interesting graphs that show that the carriers are slow to pay, further adding to the cost of working with them. They have charts that contrast the carriers and show that Verizon pays 75% of invoices within 30 days, while T-Mobile only pays 17%, and AT&T pays 15%. AT&T doesn’t pay more than 45% of its invoices for more than 60 days. Slow payments put a lot of pressure on contractors that must meet payrolls.

The behavior of the carriers is having a big impact on the contractor industry. 54% have downsized during the past three years. A lot of contractors have exited the market and are looking for work outside the cellular market. Attrition of knowledgeable technicians is killing institutional knowledge. The contractors fear that they won’t be able to respond to emergencies or support any effort in a few years to deploy 6G networks.

The Brattle report does not accuse the three big carriers of collusion but says that the desire of each to drive down operating costs is having the same impact as if they were colluding. The report warns that the industry is seeing a noticeable decline in institutional capacity. It takes time and on-the-job experience to train tower climbers – this is not a position that can be quickly ramped up. They warn that loss of experienced tower climbers is not only a concern for the industry but is a national security concern.

The report makes an interesting comparison to another monopsony industry, the companies that build airplanes. The airline industry has learned that it is most efficient if it pays enough to keep experienced workers, because that significantly reduces the time needed to build a new airplane.

The report believes that corrective action is needed. Brattle doesn’t know the best way to fix the problem, which could be done through policy, regulation, or the carriers deciding to change their practices.

This situation is a big contrast to the fiber construction industry because there are hundreds of companies building fiber, which creates significant competition to find a contractor for a project. However, there is a danger after the big spending on grants is completed that the number of companies building new fiber networks will shrink to be similar to the wireless industry.

Big Company Culture

AT&T CEO John Stankey wrote a lengthy memo to all company managers as a follow-up to a company-wide employee survey. AT&T is in the midst of an internal transformation. At the beginning of the year, AT&T mandated that all employees report to the office five days per week. The company is also pursuing an aggressive plan to reduce the number of work locations for white-collar workers to a smaller number of key hubs.

The memo included some blunt messages for employees. One of the key messages is the end of the concept of company loyalty. This is extraordinary for a corporation that historically put employees first. AT&T historically took pride from always promoting from within and that a lineman might someday become the CEO. The memo bluntly points out that “Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ’employment deal’ rooted in loyalty . . . We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”

Stankey also stressed that the company culture is shifting to put customers and change first. He said it is important for employees to know what they can expect from the company, and that employees deserve the proper tools to succeed – a clear career path, a functional office environment, and good IT systems – and said the company is working hard to provide these.

But the memo warns that employees who aren’t aligned with the company’s focus should look elsewhere. For example, the memo says, “ if a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have a difficult time aligning your priorities with those of the company and the culture we aim to establish. . . If the requirements dictated by this dynamic do not align to your personal desires, you have every right to find a career opportunity that is suitable to your aspirations and needs.”

You can read the entire internal email at the bottom of this article from Business Insider. It’s worth reading because it says a whole lot more than the few things I’ve cited in this blog.

It’s quite an extraordinary memo because it harkens back to a time when most large American corporations were like this, always putting the needs of the company above the needs of employees. But in the 60s and 70s, AT&T was the antithesis of the typical large corporation. AT&T had a compact with employees that they would have a job as long as they worked hard and made sure that customers were happy. When I worked at pre-divestiture AT&T, it was not unusual to be working with employees with twenty or thirty years at the company. But what was most extraordinary at the company was the degree to which most employees were extremely loyal to the company.

What I find most interesting about this shift at AT&T is that the company is running counter to trends in the workforce. Millennial and Gen-Z employees are, as a whole, more interested in work/life balance than in being a cog in a large company. A significant percentage of employees today will take less pay to be able to work from home at least a few days per week. Younger employees feel like they can develop peer relationships through electronic tools rather than by sitting in live meetings.

Will AT&T and other corporations with company-first policies be able to attract new employees over the coming decades, or will the company have to eventually adapt to the realities of the workforce? It’s not hard to imagine that the word is already getting out on social media that AT&T isn’t a place anybody wants to work. Even when AT&T finds new employees, will they stay? By telling employees that the company is not loyal to them, AT&T can’t expect employees to be loyal to the company, its goals, or its culture.

This new AT&T culture is starkly different than the culture at most smaller ISPs. I work with a lot of ISPs that value employees and keep them onboard through retirement. I’ve always thought this is the reason that small companies do so well when competing against the giant ISPs – customers can see the difference in the way the company values its employees and customers.

Starlink Disputes Virginia BEAD Awards

In an action that surprises nobody, Starlink has taken exception to the BEAD awards being proposed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) of Virginia, which is administering the BEAD grants in the State.

The Starlink comments were filed in response to the proposed final report from DHCD that informs NTIA of its proposed BEAD awards. Each state must solicit public comments on the proposed awards. These comments are forwarded to NTIA, and the agency has the final say on making the awards.

Starlink objected to the BEAD awards and said that it should have been awarded $60 million. To put Starlink’s complaint into perspective, Virginia is proposing to award BEAD funds to cover 133,500 locations. The proposed award to Starlink was $3.26 million to cover 5,579 locations for an average award of $584 per location. Project Kuiper was also awarded funding for satellite broadband, with a proposed award of $4.46 million to cover 6,967 locations for an average award of $641 per location. The two companies together have proposed awards to cover 9.4% of the BEAD locations in the State.

Virginia proposes to award 1,519 locations for fixed wireless technology, or 1.1% of BEAD locations. Most of the proposed funding went to fiber. It’s not easy to cite the exact percentage going to fiber since Comcast won awards for 24,343 locations, some to be served with fiber and some to be served by traditional cable TV technology. Over 89% of the awards went to either fiber or cable TV technology.

The Virginia public comment period on the proposed BEAD grants is for seven days, and other states will have similar comment periods. All of the states are hurrying to get a final report generated by the September 4 deadline set by NTIA, and most states are expected to meet the deadline. That means there will be a lot of opportunities over the next month for Starlink to make similar comments in other state’s proposed final reports.

To put Starlink’s request for $60 million into perspective, the company says that amount would cover almost all of the eligible locations in the State. We’ll have to wait to see how NTIA reacts to the Starlink comments. The agency has the flexibility to agree with or ignore Starlink. This final decision rests with Arielle Roth, the newly seated head of NTIA.

This issue has to be a hot potato in a purple state like Virginia. The state has a Republican Governor who recently praised the proposed BEAD awards. I’m sure that County and State elected officials have been publicly praising the proposed awards that will bring fiber to a lot or rural Virginia. Nobody knows what happens if NTIA agrees with Starlink. NTIA could decide which fiber grants to undo, but it would more likely pass the issue back to the State.

To complicate matters even further, Starlink’s filed comments in the BEAD process is not necessarily the end of the line, and Starlink or fiber providers who lose proposed grants in this process could file a lawsuit if they disagree with the final decision of NTIA or DHCD. BEAD could still get very messy before it’s done.