Rural Fiber Providers, WISPs, at Odds on New BEAD Mapping
NTCA wants location-by-location verification of unlicensed fixed wireless, which WISPA opposes.
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2025 – Small wireless broadband providers and rural fiber operators are feuding over the process of making new broadband coverage maps for the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
At issue is whether states should require fixed wireless providers using unlicensed spectrum to verify their coverage on a location-by-location basis. WISPA, which represents the wireless ISPs, has said work can’t be done in the seven-day window set by the Commerce Department, and NTCA, which represents the rural providers, is now urging the agency to dismiss WISPA’s criticisms.
The process, already well underway, will determine how many homes and businesses served by ULFW providers are no longer eligible for BEAD funding, and how many of those locations could be in line for a subsidized fiber build.
FROM SPEEDING BEAD SUMMIT
Panel 1: How Are States Thinking About Reasonable Costs Now?
Panel 2: Finding the State Versus Federal Balance in BEAD
Panel 3: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO Guidance
Panel 4: Building, Maintaining and Adopting Digital Workforce Skills
Commerce’s new rules “rightly and prudently” direct states “to gather data to make a more informed, accurate, and granular assessment of coverage capability,” Michael Romano, NTCA’s executive vice president, wrote in a Monday letter to Adam Cassady, acting head of the NTIA. “This kind of data-driven effort is critical to mitigate the risk that any consumer could be left behind by mapping claims that offer incomplete and imprecise assurances of coverage.”
As part of new rules handed down by the Commerce Department last month, state broadband offices have to update their eligibility maps to account for coverage by fixed wireless providers using unlicensed spectrum.
To get their service areas marked as ineligible for BEAD funding, ULFW providers have to submit to state broadband offices evidence that their networks can mitigate interference and provide service meeting minimum standards for the next four years. ULFW coverage data reported to the Federal Communications Commission suggests the process could have a significant impact on the total number of eligible locations in some states, depending on how many providers participate and whether broadband offices find their evidence convincing.
Most states are actually already done taking those evidence submissions, as they’re hustling to run another bidding round and meet a September 4 deadline for final spending plans.
WISPA, the trade group representing small and wireless ISPs, sent a letter to Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration on June 20 saying some states were “creating unreasonable and unnecessary obstacles” for ULFW operators.
The group was mainly upset with state requirements to verify coverage on a per-location basis, which it said could be impractical given the compressed timeframe.
But that’s exactly what states should be doing, according to NTCA.
The FCC’s national broadband map “is a useful and necessary starting point in depicting any given location to which a provider may be able to deliver service,” Romano wrote. “By its very terms, however, the NBM does not purport to capture whether a provider can serve every location claimed as served at the required level of performance if all of those customers were to order service.”
That could lead to “false positives” – homes and businesses marked as already having service they do not in fact have access to — if states rely too heavily on the coverage already reported to the FCC, Romano wrote. Those false positives would reduce the number of locations where fiber providers could compete for deployment funding and protect ULFW provider service areas from fiber builds.
NTIA nixed the Biden administration’s fiber preference in the new rules. The Biden NTIA had determined that only fiber could easily scale up capacity in the way required to get priority consideration under the infrastructure law. States will now be making that determination on a project-by-project basis, and providers using any technology can apply for priority.
While the new mapping process could take the eligible location count down by as much as a million, and the new rules are widely seen as making it easier for fixed wireless and satellite providers like Elon Musk’s Starlink to participate, fiber providers have been more optimistic lately.
NTCA and the Fiber Broadband Association have both pointed out recently that there’s room in the new rules for states to still find that for the most part, only fiber projects meet the law’s priority definition and get first dibs on most areas.
It’s not yet clear whether NTIA will intervene if states go that route – the agency promised to veto state decisions that were “unreasonable,” and the Trump administration has criticized fiber’s higher deployment cost. Musk, a major Republican donor and formerly an advisor to President Donald Trump, is apparently now on the outs with the president after publicly blasting the GOP budget bill.
