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.
This just shows how stupid the government programs are.
According to the current Starlink coverage map the entire state of Virginia is already covered so they are just looking for free money for something that they have already done.
All of these grants should have a poison pill clause that states that if you want to be involved in the grant process then you agree to all of the rules and rulings. If you want to sue because you didn’t like the outcome and you do so then all of your applications are automatically withdrawn and you will be excluded from the current processes and all future processes for the next 5 years. Further you agree to pay all of the governments legal costs for getting you removed.
If your company wants to be a world builder then your company needs to keep their hand out of the peoples pocket.
“””If your company wants to be a world builder then your company needs to keep their hand out of the peoples pocket.”””
There is another side to that though. If the government wants our company to do great things with internet so we aren’t “left behind” as a country they need to keep their hands out of our business. The number 1 bottleneck/cost to us as a smaller ISP is dealing with government requirements. The work and cost of expansion is 100% doable. The government picking winners is a recipe for disaster.