Oregon Re-Awards Refused BEAD Locations
Amazon Leo picked up more than 5,000 locations
WASHINGTON, July 9, 2026 – Oregon says it has plugged the remaining holes in its broadband map in its effort to ensure the entire state can get connected.
In a July 8 press release, Oregon said it found new providers for the homes and businesses handed back by preliminary winners under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
The state said it had finished a new bidding process for the nearly 13,400 locations and selected six new winners.
Amazon Leo, which is planning to launch its satellite broadband service later this year, won nearly 5,200 of the newly eligible locations in exchange for $4.2 million in grant funding. It’s putting up about $1 million in matching funds.
Five other ISPs and local governments will serve the remaining 8,200 locations for $80.5 million in funding, plus a $26.8 million collective match. The awards are tentative and will need to be cleared by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The other winners include local ISPs Alyrica, Douglas Fast Net, and Stimulus Technologies, plus two local governments: Columbia County and the City of Sherwood.
Alyrica won the most, $33.5 million, for mixed fixed wireless and fiber projects covering 3,700 locations, according to state data shared with Broadband Breakfast. Stimulus is in line for more than $31.4 million for a 2,200-location fiber project.
The munis are both deploying fiber, with Sherwood winning $15.6 million to serve more than 1,100 locations and Columbia County winning $6.5 million to serve more than 1,000. Sherwood already operates a public fiber network.
Douglas, an electric cooperative, won $613,000 to deploy fiber to 66 locations.
Last month Oregon announced that four providers had declined their awards. The biggest was Astound, which walked away from more than $90 million and about 11,000 locations.
The company said at the time that it applied for funding to build a contiguous fiber network across 25 project areas, but was only approved for 12. Building separate networks isolated from Astound’s existing assets was less financially appealing than a single large expansion, the company said.
The ISP backed out of a $165 million award in Texas for the same reason.
NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth told House lawmakers last week that more than one percent of BEAD’s roughly 4 million locations had been refused.
“I think that’s to be expected in a program this size,” she said. “We planned and we have a process in place to ensure that areas that are subject to changes get served.”
Oregon said last month its other ISPs were planning to move forward and accept their awards. The state is looking to get fiber to about half of its 105,000 BEAD locations, and is set to spend most of its $689 million allocation under the program.
The state’s broadband office said it awarded nine project areas to the five terrestrial ISPs after its first bidding round concluded on June 24.
Amazon Leo then scooped up the rest of the handed back locations after a second round that concluded June 30.
"The successful reassignment of these projects demonstrates the strength of Oregon's broadband partnerships and the resilience of the state's BEAD implementation process," Nick Batz, director of the state’s broadband office, said in a statement. "By following a transparent, competitive replacement process, Oregon has ensured that communities will continue moving toward universal access to reliable, high-speed internet."
The state said it first reached out to priority applicants that had also bid on the handed back locations, and then contacted all other priority ISPs. It only reached out to non-priority applicants “if necessary,” according to its release.
Under BEAD, priority broadband projects are those that show they can scale quickly to higher speeds and support future use cases. That initially only applied to fiber, but under Trump administration rule changes ISPs using other technologies could make their case to states.
