Texas BEAD Data Reveals Heavy Bidding from Satellite Providers
SpaceX bids on virtually all BEAD locations in the Lone Star state
WASHINGTON, July 28, 2025 – Newly released data from Texas’s benefit of the bargain round revealed heavy involvement from the satellite industry.
SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper collectively bid on 404,900 locations eligible for Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment funding in the Lone Star state. The duo’s bids represented over a quarter of the 1.45 million bids submitted by providers.
SpaceX alone submitted bids to serve 244,596 locations, making it an applicant for most, if not all, of Texas’s roughly 240,000 BEAD-eligible locations. The Elon Musk-backed satellite provider was the largest individual bidder in the state, beating out the next largest bidder by nearly 40,000 locations, according to a breakdown of state application data which surfaced Friday.
Project Kuiper was the third-largest bidder in the state, with bids for 160,304 locations. As such, roughly two-thirds of Texas’s remaining BEAD locations will have a bid from not just one but two satellite providers, in addition to any bids from fiber or fixed wireless companies.
Though data was not available on the amount of funding satellite providers requested, the broader narrative in Texas appeared to mirror that in Tennessee, which was also swarmed by applications from the pair of low-Earth orbit satellite internet providers. SpaceX and Amazon collectively submitted more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders in Tennessee, while requesting just a fraction of the funding.
Under rules adopted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, states were directed to award funding for a project area to the provider with the lowest bid, unless another provider’s bid was within 15 percent of that lowest-cost bid on a per-location basis. If that’s the case, states can then consider criteria such as network reliability, scalability, or speed.
However, NTIA guidance also encouraged states to give preference to “Priority Broadband Projects” — defined as deployments that deliver at least 100 * 20 (Megabit per second) Mbps service, with latency under 100 milliseconds, and the ability to scale to support future technologies like 5G.
It remains to be seen how many locations SpaceX and Amazon win in the state. Though some have claimed that the NTIA’s new guidance all but guarantees substantial wins for satellite at the expense of fiber; at the same time, leaders in the fiber industry have praised the changes, arguing that fiber easily meets BEAD’s statutory requirements, while other technologies do not.
Additional information may be shared at an industry roundtable hosted by the Texas Broadband Development Office on July 29. That roundtable was scheduled to occur at 3 PM CT.
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