NTIA Approves Nevada’s $416 Million in BEAD Money
New Street's Levin doesn't expect the Trump administration to put the program on hold.
Jake Neenan

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17, 2025 – It’s now three for three. Nevada’s final proposal for deploying broadband throughout the state received federal approval Thursday evening, meaning every state that released the document has been greenlit.
“Nevada’s plan shows how we can economically bring the best possible Internet service to people using a variety of technologies,” National Telecommunications and Information Administration Administrator Alan Davidson said in a statement. “Today it can put that plan into action and bring high-speed Internet service to everyone in the state.”
The state was allocated $416 million through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program to get broadband to each unconnected home and business in the state. Nevada, with lots of remote and hard-to-reach locations, brought in an additional $137 million from other federal funding sources to the table to make the math more workable for ISPs.
More than 80 percent of the state’s 51,600 eligible locations are set to receive fiber, with the rest split between satellite and fixed wireless, plus a small amount of cable. Nevada tapped Amazon’s nascent Kuiper Systems for its satellite locations.
That satellite is running the state about $3,000 per location, according to data from Nevada’s broadband office, a way of getting the most remote parts of the state connectivity without laying high-capacity but expensive fiber. The cost varies with distance, but a now-approved fiber project in the state hit as high as $77,000 per location.
Budget hawks and Republicans would have states eschew fiber for cheaper options like satellite or terrestrial fixed wireless. ITIF, a think tank which says it receives funding from several major wireline ISPs and their trade groups, had pushed Nevada to ditch those providers for Elon Musk’s Starlink, although the satellite ISP evidently lost out to Amazon in the state. Nevada argued in its draft final proposal that fiber was more certain to meet future data demands.
Louisiana and Delaware, the other two states to put forward spending plans, also got approval from the NTIA this week, allowing them to ink formal grant agreements and get shovels in the dirt. It’s going to be the only tranche of such approvals before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Davidson, the current NTIA head, is stepping down the same day. His successor has yet to be announced by the Trump transition team, although it’s reportedly coming soon.
There’s been speculation that a Trump administration would look to upend BEAD, given that the GOP has been loudly critical of the program’s preference for fiber, and that Musk, a Trump donor and advisor, owns Starlink.
Blair Levin, New Street Research policy analyst and former FCC chief of staff, wrote in an investor note Friday that something disruptive like a work stoppage while the NTIA crafts new rules—Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, now head of the Senate Commerce Committee, has called for something along those lines—would be unlikely.
“We have our doubts as slowing down aid to rural America is not optically a plus for the new Administration,” Levin wrote. He noted several red states are among the more than 20 that have begun accepting applications: “A stop work would complicate the program for them. It would also create significant uncertainty for ISPs who are potential bidders.”
The thing to watch for, from Levin’s point of view, would be a kind of formal cost-per-location cap, beyond which the NTIA would not approve spending in states that have yet to receive a green light.
“That would have the impact of shifting funding from wireline terrestrial providers to fixed wireless and satellite providers,” he wrote.
Levin and other analysts view rule changes that make the program less onerous for ISPs but don’t hold up the deployment timeline, similar to the Biden NTIA waiving financing and domestic manufacturing rules, as a pretty sure bet.