Missouri Targeting 80 Percent Fiber, Nearly $1 Billion Under BEAD Budget

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2025 – Two more states announced tentative spending plans under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program on Friday, bringing the total to 45.

The states, Missouri and South Dakota, will take public comment on their draft proposals for one week each before submitting them to the Commerce Department for approval. That approval is the last step necessary before states can start signing contracts with grant winners and funding projects under the $42.45 billion program.

Most states took comments and submitted their plans by Sept. 4, the deadline Commerce gave states in June when it handed down new rules and required an additional bidding round. The agency granted deadline extensions to states that needed more time to implement the new rules and take more bids.

California and Texas, responsible for sprawling programs with significant numbers of eligible homes and businesses, have longer extensions to submit their final BEAD plans, Nov. 2 and Oct. 27, respectively.

Illinois’s deadline is Sept. 30, implying its draft plan would be published for public comment tomorrow. Utah’s broadband office website says its draft plan “will soon be available for comment.” It’s not clear when the other remaining state, Florida, will publish its plan.

Missouri would get fiber to more than 81 percent of its nearly 214,000 funded locations under its draft plan, with satellite, largely from Amazon’s nascent Project Kuiper, would take another 13.6 percent. The remaining 5 percent would get fixed wireless.

The state would spend $792 million of its $1.74 billion BEAD allocation, coming in nearly $1 billion under budget.

“We are taking a major step forward in closing the digital divide, strengthening communities, and ensuring our state is ready to compete, thrive and move at the speed of business in a technology-driven economy,” Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) said in a statement.

South Dakota had a relatively small number of eligible locations, just under 7,000. Most of those would get fiber, just under 60 percent, and about 38 percent would get satellite, all of it from Amazon. The remaining 2 percent would get fixed wireless.

Nationally, awards have been skewing toward fiber, despite the Trump administration’s new rules eliminating an explicit preference for the technology and making it easier for satellite to compete on the basis of deployment cost, where fiber applicants are at a disadvantage.

About 67 percent of all BEAD locations across the states that have reported so far would get fiber, 20 percent would get low-earth orbit satellite, 10 percent would get fixed wireless, and the remaining 3 percent would get cable.

California and Texas, which each have large numbers of eligible locations, have not yet reported. The draft plan awards are tentative, and might be altered by Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration before the agency signs off.

NTIA is asking states to negotiate down or potentially award to another provider project areas with costs per passing above certain thresholds, which differ in each state. Project areas, the geographic areas companies bid on to serve with BEAD dollars, are constructed differently in each state, and a given project could encompass many project areas. The effect of the cost caps could be more significant in some states and less significant in others.

SpaceX has challenged several state plans, arguing it should have won many more locations based on its low bids. States can still give preference to certain technologies in a given area – the law standing up BEAD requires projects that can easily scale over time be given priority – and broadband offices have been saying tree cover and mountainous terrain can cut against wireless applicants.

While NTIA is looking for revisions before approving the submitted plans, it’s not clear they would be on the scale SpaceX is looking for.