Tag Archives: StarLink

Broadband Shorts February 2026

The following are a few interesting stories that don’t warrant a standalone blog, but that I found interesting.

Amazon One Delays. Amazon asked the FCC for a two-year delay in meeting its commitment to launch half of its promised constellation of 3,236 satellites. The deadline for having more than 1,600 satellites in orbit was July 30 of this year. As of the date of writing this blog, the company only has 212 satellites in orbit. Amazon says it has contracted for ten additional 10 SpaceX launches to speed up its process.

This is bad news for homes where Amazon One was the BEAD winner, like a number of counties where I live in Western North Carolina. If Amazon follows the historical path of Starlink, it will need at least 1,600 satellites in orbit to provide reasonable service, and more is better. With no additional delays, the service likely won’t be available until at least late summer 2028.

In related news, the FCC granted Amazon One the ability to add 4,500 satellites to its broadband constellation. This increase would result in the following: 3,232 Generation 1 satellites, 3,212 second-generation satellites, and 1,292 satellites in a polar orbit.

NTIA Opposes Relaxation of BEAD Compliance Requirements. Starlink sent a request to numerous states asking for relaxed BEAD implementation rules, which included a request that Starlink would not have to conduct speed tests for BEAD-funded customers. NTIA quickly added a new item to its Frequently Asked Questions that states that, “no BEAD statutory requirements or other program rules may be altered by a BEAD subgrant agreement”.

Charter Grows Cable Subscribers. Charter surprisingly grew cable customers in the fourth quarter of 2025 after losing customers every quarter for years. I laughed when I read that, because I know how they did this since I am one of their new cable subscribers. We called and asked about upgrading to gigabit broadband and were offered a lower price than what we pay today for 500 Mbps, but only if we agreed to take cable TV. I am now a phantom Charter cable customer who will never watch any of the content. Like many millions of households, I am no longer interested in linear TV that forces me to surf through channels I don’t want to watch.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. Twelve years ago, I was forced to take cable TV from Comcast in order to get broadband. The settop box went into the closet the first day and was never plugged in. I have to assume both Comcast and Charter paid programmers on my behalf, which is an odd and expensive financial choice.

Rural Backhaul. WISPA, the trade association for wireless ISPs, complained to the FCC that Charter is refusing to renew contracts to provide backhaul to many of its WISP members. WISPs are reliant on having at least some of the towers in a network connected by fiber, and if companies like Charter stop selling backhaul, some WISP networks will be degraded or could even go dark.

Buying rural backhaul has always been a challenge in many parts of the country due to the small number of companies with fiber that are willing to sell bandwidth to other ISPs. Many rural ISPs are forced to pay far more per gigabyte to buy rural backhaul from telcos and cable companies. It’s hard to speculate why Charter would do this. The company might want to focus its sales and marketing efforts elsewhere. But it could also be for a more sinister reason if Charter is doing this to eliminate or cripple rural competition.

Comcast Class-Action Settlement. Comcast settled a class-action lawsuit and agreed to pay $117.5 million as a result of a data breach that released sensitive customer data. That may sound like a lot, but the settlement covers 31.7 million customers and works out to a settlement of $3.70 per customer before subtracting out the amount that will go to lawyers. This settlement doesn’t place much value on customer privacy and data.

Starlink Adds Tiered Pricing

Starlink is in the industry news so often that it feels like I ought to have a recurring blog just for Starlink updates. The company recently made an interesting announcement that should make waves in the broadband industry. The company announced tiered pricing, with prices varying by speed, and starting at $50 per month in some selected markets.

This is something Starlink has always been able to do, and perhaps they are doing this because the company is profitable and has landed 2 million U.S. customers with its standard $120 price. It’s clear that the company’s network is gaining capacity at a steady pace as the company launches additional and better satellites. At the beginning of February, the company had over 9,300 working satellites in orbit out of 9,600 total satellites. The company is on track to reach its first constellation goal of having 12,000 satellites in orbit by the end of this year. The company will soon be introducing its next generation of satellites which will have significantly greater broadband capacity.

The new products announced by Starlink include:

  • Residential 100 Mbps. $50 per month. Speeds up to 100 Mbps.
  • Residential 200 Mbps. $80 per month. Speeds up to 200 Mbps.
  • Residential Max. $120 per month. New customers also get a mini kit that can be used for traveling or camping.

The 100 Mbps product comes with a warning that it’s not available everywhere, so we’ll have to wait for feedback from the public to see what that means. Having a $50 broadband product everywhere would be a big deal.

It will be interesting to see the actual speeds delivered for each product. Each of the three products is being advertised as ‘up to’ speeds. Starlink recently issued a report to customers that said that its average download speed at the end of 2025 was 170 Mbps, so it will be interesting to see the speeds that are delivered to subscribers of the 200 Mbps tier. Ookla issued a report last year that said that Starlink’s median speed was 104.7 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025, meaning half of the speeds were faster, and half were slower than that number. There is no mention by Starlink in its announcement about upload speeds. The Ookla report showed that the median upload speed was 14.8 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025.

I work in a lot of rural areas where many people either can’t or won’t pay $120 per month for broadband. Starlink could get huge market traction with a $50 product. A $50 price for 100 Mbps broadband would put huge pressure on WISPs, which generally have rates higher than that. A $50 product would also be an affordable alternative to the many rural fiber networks being built by grants.

A $50 rate also would play well in cities. That rate competes well against the low-cost options in cities from DSL or FWA wireless. Most big telcos have raised DSL rates to the range of $65 per month. The FWA carriers have list rates of around $60, but customers can get it for less by bundling with a cellphone plan and agreeing to autopay. I can’t see Starlink cleaning up in cities with a $50 rate, but it would get a lot more customers than it has today in those markets.

In other pricing news, Starlink increased the monthly data cap on its Roam product to 100 gigabytes per month. This product is also $50 per month and is aimed at RVs and hikers. The average U.S. home uses around 700 gigabytes, but this will be attractive to homes that aren’t big broadband users. Starlink significantly chokes speeds after the monthly cap is reached.

Starlink Flexing Its Market Power

In a short period of time, Starlink has taken three actions that demonstrates the company’s growing market power. The companies market power will be strengthened with the impending merger between SpaceX and Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI. Analysts have estimated the combined companies could garner a market value over $1 trillion.

The first move from Starlink came on January 15 when the company updated its user Privacy Policy. The revised terms say that, unless a customer opts out, Starlink can use user data “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models”, and that user data could be shared with third-party collaborators without providing more details to customers.

This should be disturbing to customers, because this doesn’t just mean sharing details of emails. In today’s broadband world, it could mean sharing video images, voice prints, and the giant amount of private information that an ISP can learn about its customers if it is looking.

Starlink’s second big move came when it sent a document to State Broadband Offices where Starlink is a tentative winner of BEAD grants. Starlink asked that LEO providers be excused from many of the BEAD obligations that will apply to other grant winners. The Starlink communication included a veiled threat that the company could pull out of BEAD if SBOs don’t meet its suggested terms.

Among the suggested changes, Starlink payments would not be linked to adding subscribers, and it would get 50% of BEAD funding up front and the rest over a specified schedule. Starlink would not have to provide financial reporting or provide any documentation about how it spends the grant funding. Starlink wants to be excused from speed test requirements since it can’t guarantee that subscribers have installed the satellite receiver properly. Starlink also wants to be excused from insurance and labor requirements.

On January 30, SpaceX asked the FCC for the ability to launch 1 million new satellites to create a giant orbital data center for AI. These satellites would be placed between 310 and 1,240 miles above Earth, in narrow 30-mile bands that would leave room to deconflict with other companies with similar goals. SpaceX says the giant satellite constellation is needed as the first step for humanity to become a Kardashev II-level civilization that fully harnesses the Sun’s power, while also providing enough AI capacity to serve billions of people. FYI, a Kardashev II-level civilization is one that fully harnesses the total energy output from its parent star. SpaceX says putting data centers in space is the most efficient way to meet the growing energy demands of AI data centers.

The constellation would use laser communications between satellites and would communicate back to Earth using Starlink’s current broadband constellation.  SpaceX says it could launch the data center satellites at a rapid pace using its new Starship launch vehicle.

Announcing these three things within a month shows a company that is feeling emboldened enough by market power to act as it wishes. If a terrestrial ISP openly said it will use customer data to train AI, it would risk being shunned in the market, but Starlink operates in many places where there are no other competitive options. I wonder how safe Starlink customers will feel about their data even if they opt out of sharing it with Starlink.

It’s going to be interesting to see how State Broadband Offices react to the Starlink demand for easier BEAD terms. Many of the SBOs didn’t want to make big awards to LEO satellite providers, and were coerced by  NTIA to do so with the Benefit of the Bargain rules. It’s not unimaginable that some States will outright reject Starlink’s request, which could lead to some interesting fights between States and NTIA.

The request to launch 1 million satellites could be a stunt to boost interest in the upcoming IPO and merger. Or it could be real. This FCC clearly favors satellite technology, but even for them, a request to launch 1 million satellites has to be an extreme request.

Broadband Shorts January 2026

This blog covers topics that I found interesting but which don’t warrant an entire blog.

Indoor CBRS. Federated Wireless announced a new product and a system that allows cellular carriers to use CBRS spectrum inside large buildings like hotels, malls, office buildings, and sports venues. The system places CBRS antennas throughout a building to provide the needed coverage. The concept behind the deployment is to let the carriers use free CBRS spectrum inside buildings to preserve licensed spectrum for outdoors. Currently, big crowds, like at a sporting event, can use licensed spectrum that reduces the coverage in the immediately surrounding areas. All except really old cellphones are capable of using CBRS spectrum.

Map of Data Centers by State. I found this map that shows the number of existing data centers in each state to be interesting.

Customer Interest in Satellite Cellular. A report published by GSMA Intelligence showed that 56% of the U.S. respondents to a survey said they would pay extra each month to be able to connect to satellite cellular. One of the interesting statistics from the survey is that 23% of cellular customers reported that they were unable to use basic texting at least 5 times per month. That’s not surprising to anybody who has studied rural cellular coverage, and who understands that the typical city has numerous dead zones for a given carrier.

While this finding is clearly encouraging for the companies busy deploying satellites for cell service, the 60% finding is likely overstated for now and will probably decrease once the public understands the limits of satellite cellular. It doesn’t work well indoors and is a challenge from a moving vehicle. It seems likely that satellite cellular will be far less robust in terms of data capabilities. I suspect over time that the fledgling industry will tackle these shortcomings, and this could eventually become popular product for anybody who  lives or routinely works in areas with poor cell coverage.

Starlink Approved for More Satellites. The FCC recently authorized Starlink to operate an additional 7,500 next-generation satellites. This order doubles Starlink’s authorized next-generation satellites to 15,000, still only half of its request for 30,000 additional satellites. The FCC deferred any decision on the remaining 14,988 Starlink requests to use orbits above 600 kilometers. This order also allows Starlink to expand the use of spectrum in the Ku- and Ka-bands for links to customers, and the V-, E-, and W-bands for connections to earth station gateways.

CommScope Cancels Fiber Factory Expansion. On the day that CommScope was renamed as Vistance Networks, the company announced it is cancelling plans to expand its fiber manufacturing facility in Catawba, North Carolina. In doing so, the company will be foregoing a $2 million economic development grant that would have covered some of the $60 million expansion cost. The expansion was going to create 250 additional jobs.

One reason for the change is a recent transaction where CommScope spun off much of its manufacturing capacity to Amphenol.  The announcement also said part of the change was due to the smaller amount of fiber being constructed with BEAD grants. While there is a lot of current discussion about a short-term supply chain issue with obtaining fiber, it’s likely that the company also looked out at fiber demand five and ten years from now.

Starlink Update

Starlink did something new and recently issued an update discussing the recent history and the outlook for the company. Perhaps the company will update this kind of report periodically.

Coverage and Customers. Starlink says it became available in 42 new countries around the world during 2025. The company says it has over 6 million customers, which includes over 2 million customers in the U.S. The most impressive statistic is that the company added 2.7 million customers worldwide over the past year, an annual growth rate of 82%.

Constellation. SpaceX had more than 100 missions during the year to add 2,300 Starlink satellites to the constellation. At the end of the year, there were more than 9,400 satellites in orbit, including about 100 satellites that are inactive and in the process of deorbiting. Starlink’s target for the first constellation is 12,000 satellites, and the company should be getting close to that goal by the end of 2026.

The company has begun to launch a series of satellites with a polar orbit that will provide coverage to Alaska and other northern areas. The goal was to have 400 satellites in a polar orbit by the end of 2025.

Starlink says that it has over 100 ground station gateway sites in the U.S. that are comprised of over 1,500 antennas for communicating with satellites, with all of the gateway antennas manufactured in Redmond, Washington.

The company says that new satellites are all equipped with lasers that can be used to communicate between satellites.

Speeds and Latency. The report includes a chart of the average speed and latency since early 2022. Starlink measures the performance of the constellation every 15 seconds. The chart shows the average download speed in 2022 was around 23 Mbps, and has grown to over 170 Mbps by late 2025. Latency has improved significantly, starting at 44 milliseconds in 2022, down to around 24 milliseconds in late 2025. Starlink says it is approaching its goal of a stable 20 millisecond latency.

Network Capacity. Probably the major reason for the improved speeds and latency is the constant increase in the overall capacity of the constellation coming from new and better satellites. The report includes a graph showing the overall capacity of the network. At the end of 2022, the constellation had about 40 terabytes of capacity. Near the end of 2025, capacity grew to around 445 terabytes, with a growth curve that is still on a steep climb. The company says it is adding about 5 terabytes of capacity to the network per week with new launches.

Network capacity is going to get a big boost when the new third-generation satellites are launched, sometime in the first half of this year. Each new satellite will have over 1 terabit of download speed capacity and 200 gigabits of upload.

Future Satellite Competition

I’ve been thinking about the long-term trajectory for satellite broadband in rural areas. I saw a recent estimate that Starlink has around 2.6 million customers in the U.S. and is still growing. I have to think that most of these customers live in places that don’t have a fast broadband alternative to satellite broadband.

I got to thinking about satellite after a recent conversation with an Uber driver. She lives in a small rural town in my county, and she and most of her neighbors use Starlink today. She says that it works adequately well for the way her family uses broadband, but that it’s far too expensive. She expects to be changing to fiber in 2026 when Frontier builds fiber in her area. She said she already knows people nearby who changed to Frontier fiber that was built in 2025. I researched her neighborhood, and Frontier is building fiber with the help of a broadband grant funded by the State of North Carolina.

There has already been a lot of rural fiber built with grant funding. There are fiber construction projects underway from CAF II, RDOF, ReConnect, NTIA Tribal, and EA-CAM. States awarded a huge amount of grants from the Capital Project Funds, from ARPA, and from State general funds. My best estimate is that these various programs will fund the construction of fiber to around 8 million rural fiber passings. My estimates are that there are still 2.2 million passings to be built from these programs in 2026 and another 1.2 million passings in 2027. On top of these programs, it looks like there will be roughly another 2.5 million rural fiber passings coming from the BEAD grants that have been tentatively announced.

I don’t have a good estimate for the coming passings from rural fixed wireless construction, but there is still construction of WISP networks being funded by RDOF and other grant programs. It looks like BEAD has tentatively awarded grants for fixed wireless to a little less than half a million new passings. WISPs are building networks with speed capabilities in the range of 500 Mbps download, which is a lot faster than what is being delivered by Starlink today.

These various grant programs are going to cover a lot of rural America with fast broadband, and that is going to eat into the potential market for Starlink and Amazon LEO. Starlink faces the issue of having a price that is significantly higher than the large majority of ISPs that are building grant-funded networks. That’s something that the company can fix by lowering rates. But even with lower rates, Starlink will not match the speeds of the grant-funded networks, at least with current satellite technology.

We have no real ideas about the pricing and speed capabilities of Amazon LEO. There is a lot of speculation that the company will create interesting bundles for satellite broadband with Amazon video and shopping.

The bottom line of my speculation is that the U.S. households that will be interested in satellite broadband will be shrinking over the next few years as millions of rural homes get faster broadband alternatives from fiber or fixed wireless.

It’s also likely that there will be serious competition between Starlink and Amazon LEO as they each try to lock down a share of the U.S. market. Will the two companies collude to keep prices high, or will they devolve into the kind of fierce competition we see in the cellular industry today?

On a worldwide basis, both U.S. satellite providers are going to see significant competition from the Guowang (the National Network) from China and the Quinfan (Thousand Sails) constellation from Shanghai. My best guess is that these two companies will undercut the prices of the U.S. providers to try to corner the markets in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Starlink has a unique market opportunity today since it brings the only fast broadband option to huge numbers of homes. But in North America and Europe, those opportunities will decrease as faster terrestrial networks are constructed. Starlink’s unique monopoly disappears when Amazon LEO enters the market, and possibly gets really competitive when other worldwide constellations come online.

Another Look at Starlink Performance

The Internet Society published a blog by Isabel Suizo of Carnegie Mellon University that looks at Starlink’s impact on digital equity.

The blog made three interesting points about Starlink. First, Starlink is not meeting the regulatory performance goals in the U.S., the EU, and Australia. The blog cites speed tests from M-Labs that show that only 24.7% of U.S. speed tests, 13.6% of EU speed tests, and 42.2% of Australian speed tests exceeded 100 Mbps. That speed requirement to qualify as broadband came from the BEAD grants in the US, the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF) in the EU, and the Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) regime in Australia.

The analysis noted that Starlink comes closer to meeting the regulatory goals if it is judged only by the peak speed measured at a given location, versus looking at average speeds over time. This is a major finding that has not been widely discussed before. It means that Starlink speeds vary for a customer and that Starlink does not deliver a reliable speed of at least 100 Mbps. The blog contrasts this with fiber, where average and maximum speeds are similar, meaning fiber delivers a reliably steady speed.

The second finding of the report is that there is little difference in Starlink broadband throughput between the top 10% and bottom 10% of households ranked by household incomes. That means, at least at the global level, that Starlink delivers the same broadband to everybody.

However, that’s not entirely true since Starlink does offer priority service to businesses and users like ships in the ocean. These priority customers pay extra to guarantee good broadband. It has also not been widely discussed that Starlink restricts broadband speeds for customers who exceed its 1 terabyte data cap in a month.

The final conclusion of the paper is that LEO networks have the potential to improve broadband performance in remote, underserved users. That is not surprising since it matches the stated goals for both Starlink and Kuiper. These companies have touted since they began that they can bring broadband to the underserved and unserved around the world.

Overall, this analysis adds to the evidence of how Starlink works in practice. The biggest revelation from the research I that speeds to a given customer vary, and that speeds are sometimes solid and sometimes aren’t. The research shows that, at least for now, Starlink is largely delivering the same broadband to everybody, with the caveat that there are customers who are willing to pay more for a higher priority. Only time will tell if priority for pay becomes a regular feature of LEO broadband. Finally, Starlink seems to be meeting its stated goals of bringing broadband to places outside of the reach of landline broadband networks.

Why BEAD to Kuiper?

There is no question that this has turned into one of the oddest years for broadband during my career. We’ve seen Digital Equity grants killed. We’re seeing the spending for BEAD being cut in half. And maybe oddest of all, we’re seeing States make sizeable BEAD grant awards to Kuiper, although the company isn’t close to having its first broadband customer.

You might think we should have learned a lesson from when Starlink was a big winner in the RDOF reverse auction. The FCC eventually killed those awards after it determined that Starlink was not ready to fulfill a major commitment to serve large numbers of locations in specific geographies.

As of the date of this blog, Kuiper has 153 working satellites in orbit. It has scheduled launches of an additional 72 satellites before the end of the year. It’s worth noting that previous planned launches have all been seriously delayed.

Kuiper was granted permission in July 2020 to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites. The satellites will be deployed at three altitudes of 370 miles, 380 miles, and 390 miles. The company says it will begin beta testing when it reaches 578 satellites deployed at 390 miles. To put this into perspective, Starlink launched commercial service when it reached 1,260 satellites. Even with that number, early Starlink customers complained about short service lapses between satellites. Kuiper is under pressure from the FCC to have 1,618 satellites in orbit by mid-2026 to maintain its spectrum licenses.

For the last month, I’ve been perplexed by the magnitude of the BEAD awards being made to Kuiper. As of the date of this blog, Kuiper has tentative BEAD awards for 324,000 locations, second only to Starlink at 427,000. The next biggest award winner is Comcast with 233,000 locations. These are tentative awards, and NTIA is still reviewing and may reject some of the tentative awards to fiber, which would likely increase the awards to satellite.

Kuiper is not nearly as ready as Starlink was with RDOF. The RDOF reverse auction closed at the end of 2020, and Starlink invited selected customers from its waiting list to try the service in January 2021. Starlink started taking pre-orders nationwide in April 2021. Starlink could finally reach every part of the lower 48 states in March 2022.

One of the oddest things about Kuiper is that nobody knows how fast the service will be until it is deployed. Early Starlink customers received speeds that were faster than advertised, but speeds went downhill quickly as customer additions outpaced satellite deployments.

Starlink is only now on the cusp of delivering consistent 100/20 Mbps broadband. According to a report from Ookla, Starlink speed tests in the second quarter of 2022 showed a median download speed of 53.95 Mbps, meaning half of customers had speeds faster than that speed, and half were slower. Median upload speeds in that quarter were 7.5 Mbps. In the first quarter of 2025, Ookla reported that Starlink had climbed to a median broadband speed of 104.71 Mbps download and 14.84 Mbps upload, nearly double the speeds in 2022. The Ookla report said that only 17.4 % of Starlink customers fully met the FCC definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps per second, with the limiting factor for many customers being slow upload speeds.

I saw a recent quote from a State broadband manager, when asked why he made an award to Kuiper, said it was because they bid the lowest cost per passing. That seems like a cynical response, and it makes me wonder if State Broadband Managers have thrown up their hands and are just following NTIA’s rules without questions.

The chances are good that Kuiper will complete the constellation and will eventually deliver satellite broadband. But history has also shown that new technology companies are often late in meeting commitments and sometimes fail altogether. The BEAD grant process is taking a big chance that Kuiper will meet its obligations and that speeds will be reasonably fast – something that nobody can know until it happens.

BEAD Awards and Satellite

North Carolina, where I live, recently announced its preliminary awards for BEAD. The State has allocated $408.5 million for preliminary BEAD awards out of an allocation of BEAD money to the State of $1.5 billion. That leaves an astounding $1.1 billion on the table and likely unspent. There is some hope that the unspent money, referred to as non-deployment funds, will be at least partially available to the State for broadband-related activities. But that possibility seems to be dwindling every day.

The State had to cover 93,138 homes and 374 community anchor institutions with the BEAD funds. The State made awards to build fiber to 68% of the locations, to deploy cable or fixed wireless to 2% of locations, and to subsidize low-orbit satellite providers for the remaining 30% of locations.

Now that the awards have been announced, we can finally see the proposed BEAD areas by location and technology. I live in Western North Carolina, that was devastated a year ago by Hurricane Helene. There was a lot of hope in this part of the state that most of the awards would go to fiber. The State mostly did okay for Western North Carolina. Of the 29,400 BEAD-eligible locations in this part of the state, over 24,000 went to ISPs who promise to build fiber, leaving 5,300 locations that will get awards for low-orbit satellite. Most of the satellite funding in the State went to Kuiper, which got $15.9 million out of the $18.3 million awarded to satellite. People here are scratching their heads, wondering why a company with only a hundred satellites is being awarded grant funding.

But now that the funding for satellite has sunk in, I’m starting to see what this means for Western North Carolina. First, there are five counties where satellite was awarded to all of the eligible BEAD locations – Clay, Madison, Mitchell, Polk, and Yancey.

What do County officials in those counties tell people? NTIA is giving money mostly to Kuiper and some to Starlink to be able to offer them satellite broadband. All of the BEAD-eligible locations in these counties can already buy satellite broadband from Starlink. The only benefit of BEAD for these residents is that they will probably get a free receiver for enrolling as a BEAD customer. Any hope these counties had of filling in the map with fiber is now gone.

There may be future broadband grants. For example, USDA is planning a new round of ReConnect grants. But even if we assume that ReConnect can be used to cover areas served by satellite, ReConnect won’t make a big dent in areas given satellite from BEAD. So far, with 45 states reporting preliminary BEAD results, the two satellite companies have been awarded $707 million in BEAD. That’s a lot of locations nationwide, and the number is likely going to grow significantly before BEAD grants are final.

It was understood from the time that the BEAD rules were adopted by Congress that there would have to be some remote locations that can’t be reached with fiber. But nobody thought it would be nearly as many as we are seeing. The BEAD grants were originally going to award $45.5 billion in grants, but it now looks like the actual awards will be less than half of that amount.

In North Carolina, a lot of the 5,300 locations in Western North Carolina could have gotten fiber if the state had been able to use more of the $1.1 billion it will be returning to Treasury. I fully understand the desire to be cost-conscious with federal funding, but BEAD was intended by Congress to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build long-term broadband infrastructure for a lot of rural America. I always assumed that the BEAD emphasis on fiber first would have meant that States would be judged for the whole portfolio of grants being awarded, and wouldn’t shy from awarding BEAD for areas where construction costs are higher than average.

I have to mention that the proposed grant awards are far from final. I’ve heard from multiple States that NTIA is now asking them to either reduce the amount of funding for some grants or reassign the money to somebody else. That likely will mean even more locations will go to satellite by the time the dust settles and the BEAD grants are final.

Space Shorts September 2025

Space has been a part of the communications networks since the communications satellite Telstar was first put into orbit in 1962. I remember as a kid tracking Telstar across the sky. Space today is an increasingly important part of communications. The following are a few pieces of space news I recently found to be interesting..

Low-Orbit LEO. The Spanish startup Kreios Space is working to develop a new type of satellite that can fly at lower altitudes. LEO satellites today typically fly at altitudes from 220 to 350 miles above the Earth. Kreios is working on satellites that would fly at an altitude of 125 miles. LEO satellites for companies like Starlink are parked high enough to avoid the drag caused by the upper atmosphere. Kreios would be able to fly lower by using air intake to drive electric motors that would generate enough thrust to maintain altitude. This would allow for long-duration orbits and the ability to move the satellite without needing any traditional fuel.

It’s not hard to understand the advantage of flying at lower altitudes. The satellites would be able to observe the ground in much greater detail. Communications and broadband satellites at a lower altitude would mean lower latency and faster communications times.  The company thinks the improvement in performance would be between 3 and 16 times better than the current LEO satellites flying at higher altitudes.

 Bluetooth Satellites. Hubble Network is a startup that is building a fleet of satellites to communicate with Bluetooth devices. The Bluetooth devices involved are different than the typical Bluetooth device that is designed to send a lot of data for a short distance. Instead, Hubble will connect to low-power Bluetooth sensors that only transmit a small amount of data. Hubble launched its first two satellites in 2024, now has seven satellites in orbit, and plans on having a full satellite constellation in place by 2028.

The advantage of the technology for Hubble customers is the use of low-power Bluetooth devices that are far less costly than connecting to cellular technology. Sensors can be placed anywhere on the planet that are out of reach of cellular networks and can be used for functions like tracking the movement of cargo ships. Hubble is already tracking millions of devices and expects to be able to keep track of billions. The company today is working with customers like Life360, which has a location-based safety service that can let families and friends share real-time locations with each other. The sensors can be used to track vehicle fleets and can provide instant feedback on things like driving speeds.

 Space Robots. I can’t think of a space sci-fi movie that didn’t have worker robots in the background taking care of the maintenance required to work in space. I saw an article about Icarus, a startup that is raising money to develop robot workers to replace astronauts on the ISS space station. That set me on a search to understand the space robotics market, and there is a space robot-race underway. Established companies like Maxar Technologies, Northrup Grumann, NDA, Honeybee Robotics, and Motiv Space Systems have been active in the field. They are joined by numerous startups, including Astrobotic Technology, GITAI, Rovial Space, BigDipper Exploration Technologies, Space 11, and Novium.

We’ve already seen space robots for many years, like the various Mars rovers like Nasa’s Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance, and China’s Zhurong. The companies listed are working on robots of all sizes, from the inchworm robots being developed GITAI to moon rovers being developed by several companies.

Asteroid Mining. There have now been several trips to explore asteroids and bring back samples. This includes NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission that returned samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2023 and the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission, which returned samples from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020. These missions were government-funded and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and were funded for scientific research purposes.

Startup Karman+ is working on being able to fund a round trip to asteroids for roughly $10 million, with the cost to hopefully drop in the future. This is the first step in developing an asteroid mining industry that would use robots to mine valuable metals from asteroids and round-trip rockets to ferry materials back to Earth orbit. This first mission only plans to bring back one kilogram of material and is a test of concept for the technology. The ultimate technology will need to mine the materials in space needed to create the fuel needed to return heavier payloads back to Earth.