I remember that within a month after BEAD was announced, there were a lot of predictions that the program was going to be a huge giveaway to the largest telcos and cable companies. There was some reason for that outlook since there had been huge giveaways to large telcos in the past, such as the $10 billion CAF II fiasco.

I felt optimistic from the beginning that BEAD would not all go to big companies due to the fact that BEAD was being driven by States, and not by federal grant programs. I expected that States would have widely varying ideas on how to award the grants. States lost a lot of the flexibility in choosing different types of winners after the NTIA revised the BEAD grants to basically be a one-round reverse auction.

We’re now starting to see some of the preliminary BEAD results, and it’s a mixed bag – with some states favoring large companies and others not. I call the awards preliminary because every grant award made by the States still has to be approved by NTIA, and nobody knows what they are going to do with the proposed grants. NTIA could go along with State recommendations or could force States to award more money to ISPs with the lowest bids for funding, like the satellite companies. That’s something that we may not know for months.

The following is an analysis of the 29 states that announced BEAD awards by August 29. My analysis only looks at the 23 states that have made BEAD awards of over $100 million. In the following analysis, I consider the following as large companies: AT&T, Brightspeed, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated Communications, Frontier, Mediacom, and Windstream.

There are seven states so far that have awarded 5% or less of the funding to large ISPs, led by Kansas, with no BEAD awards to large companies.There are five states that have awarded 50% or more of awards to large companies, led by North Carolina at 85.9%.Following are the amounts of awards to large companies in the 23 states that are awarding more than $100 million.The biggest surprise in that list is AT&T. Just a year ago, the company said it was still thinking about participating in BEAD. A little surprising is the relatively small size of BEAD awards to Charter, which had been so aggressive in winning RDOF. Note, however, that this list is far from final since some large states like Texas, California, Illinois, Missouri, and Florida have yet to announce BEAD grants.