All 56 Federal Broadband Plans Approved. Construction Comes Next
Illinois was the final state approved under the federal government’s landmark broadband program. Michigan, Hawaii, Virginia and California are among many states now building.
On August 25, the Trump administration Commerce Department finally approved Illinois’s spending plan under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Illinois was the last straggler of the 56 states and territories to receive clearance under the $42.5 billion internet funding program.
“With all 56 Final Proposals now approved, we are achieving Congress’s vision of closing the digital divide once and for all,” said Arielle Roth, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which administers the program.
Illinois was last because NTIA kept sending its plan back. “The proposal that was submitted to us just didn’t meet the mark, in terms of finding efficiencies and meeting the principles of the benefit of the bargain reforms,” Roth told Representative Robin Kelly, a Democrat from Illinois, at a June oversight hearing.
The approved plan cut some funding short. Illinois will spend $831 million of its original $1.04 billion allocation, which was also down from $990 million in its draft plan.
And yet while satellite locations were cut by more than half, to 11,500, after new federal coverage maps showed many were already served or misclassified, fiber locations also fell from more than 117,000 to 97,000. Fixed wireless more than doubled, to 33,600.
Fiber is generally regarded as the most advanced technology, followed by fixed wireless or cable, and then by low-Earth orbit satellites (LEO).
Even so, Illinois will get to spend nearly 79.9% of its allocation – a larger share than almost all states – on broadband deployment.
Under the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in November 2021, states were to be given a funding level. Some funds would go to “deployment” – actual fiber and wireless networks. Other so-called “non-deployment” funds would cover training programs and other tools meant to facilitate more extensive broadband usage.
So while the funding levels for each state were set in June 2023, the percentage of funding that states may spend on any specific activity needed to be approved by the Commerce Department.
Oregon has been approved to spend $587 million, or 85% of its original allocation, while Idaho is approved to spend $426 million, or 73% of its original allocation. Wisconsin is approved to spend $696 million, 65% of its original allocation. Those are among the highest percentage states.
The funding approvals of almost all smaller states, particularly in New England, were cut to less than 10% of the amounts originally awarded under the Biden administration. And that region is not an anomaly: Nebraska was awarded 11%, Florida was awarded 20%, and North Carolina 21%.
The low percentages, generally speaking, owe to pencil-sharpening by the Commerce Department. But that now means that the NTIA has another problem on its hands: How will the agency spend more than $21 billion in “remaining” non-deployment funds?
For those states with low percentages that have been approved to spend, there will be – theoretically, unless the Trump administration seeks to rescind individual states’ award numbers – that much more available in remaining funds.
And, to date, the Trump administration has been very skeptical about the purposes for which these non-deployment funds may be used. Roth and the NTIA have repeatedly delayed providing guidance on what will and won’t be allowable expenses for these non-deployment funds.
Contracts and construction
On August 26, Michigan signed grant contracts with 17 of the 29 organizations selected for its BEAD awards. The state expects construction to begin this month.
That state’s plan calls for $917 million in federal funds plus $558 million in provider matching funds — about $1.47 billion total across 116 project awards covering 197,964 locations. Fiber accounts for 86% of planned connections; low-Earth orbit satellites account for 12% percent.
Each signed contract begins a four-year clock to substantially complete construction and begin delivering service. The satellite awards — roughly $28 million to SpaceX and $8 million to Amazon’s service, dubbed Leo — continue through 2040.
Electric cooperatives feature prominently in Michigan’s awards, with Midwest Energy & Communications receiving $60 million for 2,726 miles of buried fiber, and other co-ops.
Michigan also shows what the program’s 2025 restructuring cost. The state ran a full selection round — 392 applications — before NTIA’s June 2025 policy notice eliminated the fiber preference and required every state to rescind provisional awards and start over.
Those lowest-cost rules left about $640 million of Michigan’s $1.56 billion allocation outside the deployment budget. The state broadband office is weighing AI infrastructure, 5G expansion and pole resiliency work for those “non-deployment” funds.
Hawaii itself is a stage further along. Construction is underway on a buildout once envisioned at $95 million that will now reach the same locations for $31 million in federal funds. The contracts set different clocks: Hawaiian Telcom has four years to perform; Amazon Leo has 10.
Complications and challenges
Virginia signed agreements with 19 of its 22 BEAD winners by early August. Roth spent approval week touring Virginia projects with Representative Morgan Griffith, a Republican.
The same week, the same office stripped broadband provider RiverStreet Networks from multiple state-subsidized projects intended to reach more than 30,000 rural customers, after years of missed deadlines and funding shortfalls.
Both are post-award management, the work that follows the signatures. In the FCC’s separate Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program, roughly a third of winning providers eventually defaulted.
California, whose late-approved BEAD proposal was blessed on July 20, is advancing a state program on parallel track. The Golden State Connect Authority — a joint powers authority of 40 rural counties — became the first entity to sign a master agreement with the California Department of Technology to use the state’s new middle-mile fiber network.
A middle-mile network provides connectivity between an internet exchange point and local, last-mile fiber deployments. You can think of the middle-mile, by analogy, as the tertiary roads of a transportation network connecting interstate highways to local, neighborhood roads.
The agreement, signed in July and announced August 21, connects the authority’s Golden State Fiber network to the state backbone. Golden State Fiber is publicly owned and open access: The authority finances, builds, owns and operates the infrastructure, with operational support from Utah’s UTOPIA Fiber, and private providers sell service over it.
Construction began in Glenn County in April — the first of seven deployments across Alpine, Amador, Glenn, Imperial, Mono and Tehama counties and the Town of Mammoth Lakes.
That is some of the state’s most remote territory, with Alpine being its least-populated county. The network is expected to reach more than 31,000 locations, with remaining groundbreakings and the first connected customers in early 2027.
The result is a stack of public networks, including state-owned middle mile and county-owned last-mile fiber.
Louisiana and SpaceX
Also, Louisiana announced on August 26 that SpaceX will spend $100 billion on a rocket-launching facility covering 125,000 acres of coastal Vermilion Parish. The state sold the land to the company for $100 million.
SpaceX is also a Louisiana BEAD subgrantee, and state officials said those BEAD locations are unchanged by the announcement. Still, SpaceX said that it would offer new and existing Starlink broadband customers in the parash a 50% monthly discount.
The irony is that a private company is spending $100 billion in the state on Louisiana land and rockets. That far dwarfs the entire total federal allocation of $42.5 for broadband under BEAD.
This article was produced in collaboration with Broadband Breakfast partner Daily Yonder, and is also published on Daily Yonder on September 4, 2026.
