Louisiana Signs Seven BEAD Grant Agreements

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2026 – Louisiana has signed Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program grant agreements with seven ISPs, the state’s broadband office announced Thursday.

The state said it was the first in the country to officially sign papers with grant winners as part of the $42.45 billion program. The projects are expected to break ground “in the coming weeks,” according to Louisiana’s broadband office.

The projects cover nearly 40,000 of the state’s roughly 127,000 BEAD locations. The ISPs that signed include AT&T, Brightspeed, Comcast, Nextlink, Direct Communications, Pelican broadband, and SkyRider Communications.

The broadband office said in a release that the remaining ISPs were expected to finalize their grant agreements “soon, allowing work to begin shortly thereafter.”

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has approved 39 states’ spending plans under BEAD. Once NTIA approval is secured, states need approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the program’s grants manager, before they can start the process of finalizing and signing contracts like Louisiana is doing.

Most of the state’s BEAD locations are in line for fiber, about 81 percent. Another 8 percent will get satellite, 6 percent will be fixed wireless, and 5 percent cable.

Most of the locations covered by the finalized grant agreements will also get fiber. Some Comcast locations are in line for cable and Nextlink is deploying fixed wireless to its roughly 7,500 BEAD locations in the state.

The awards mark a new phase of the program after years of mapping and preparation since the Infrastructure Law, which created BEAD, was signed in 2021. The Trump administration overhauled the program’s rules in June and made it easier for satellite providers like SPaceX to compete for grant dollars, but about two-thirds of the program’s roughly 4.2 million eligible locations are still in line for fiber.

NTIA has been working for years to streamline federal permitting processes in an effort to prevent a bottleneck once BEAD projects start construction. The agency has built online processing tools and worked with other federal agencies to exempt as many of the program’s projects as possible from the most time-consuming environmental and historical reviews.

State and local permits are a separate issue. NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth has suggested she would support using BEAD non-deployment money on providing resources for streamlining local permitting processes.

Non-deployment dollars are expected to be about $21 billion of the program’s funding, partly due to Trump administration efforts to cut costs. The NTIA hasn’t yet released official guidance on how states will be able to use that cash. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, was one of the first GOP politicians to push the Commerce Department not to claw the money back.

ISPs have four years to complete BEAD projects under the program’s rules.