Trump Administration's BEAD Overhaul Aided SpaceX: Levin
Delaying funding allowed the company more time to scoop up rural subscribers, he said
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23, 2026 – Satellite broadband provider SpaceX benefited from changes to a $42.45 billion grant program that made it easier for the company to compete for funding.
But more than additional funding, the provider received a boon in the form of more time to scoop up rural broadband subscribers before subsidized competition arrived, according to longtime telecom industry analyst Blair Levin.
“By delaying for a couple of years, which is what the Trump administration has done, [Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] helped Musk both gain customers — and then it’s really hard to turn them away — but also for the purposes of the IPO, if you look at lots of markets, there’s still a lot of upside for Starlink to get to,” he said.
Levin spoke during a FIber Broadband Association webinar. He served as Federal Communications Commission chief of staff from 1993-1997 and led the creation of the agency’s national broadband expansion plan in 2010.
SpaceX went public in June but is still controlled by Elon Musk. The company’s Starlink service is the dominant satellite broadband product.
Amazon Leo was the other satellite ISP to bid for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment funding, but the company hasn’t started offering service yet. Initial service is planned for later this year.
Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration has been accused by Democratic lawmakers of favoring satellite ISPs and Musk, a major GOP donor. The agency has insisted its focus on low deployment costs isn’t designed to favor a particular company or technology.
Between them, the SpaceX and Amazon are in line for about $1 billion under federally approved state spending plans.
That number is likely to come down though, since the Trump administration has asked states to reduce their satellite awards in light of new FCC broadband coverage maps.
The downward revision could reduce SpaceX and Amazon’s locations, and thus potentially their pay out, by 35-42 percent, according to an analysis by the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute.
But in Levin’s view, that’s almost beside the point, given that SpaceX had more time as the only high-speed ISP that could serve the roughly 4 million rural locations targeted by BEAD.
When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, three states had spending plans approved by the Commerce Department, and many more had already finished bidding.
Lutnick and NTIA Arielle Roth weren’t fans of the Biden administration’s preference for fiber, which provides high speeds but is expensive to deploy, and in June 2025 they overhauled the program and revoked the approved plans. The new rules emphasized low deployment cost and made it easier for satellite operators to bid.
After a new round of bidding, state plans have now all been approved and projects are beginning to break ground in some states.
SpaceX finished 2025 with about 12 million global and 2.7 million U.S. subscribers, according to an estimate from New Street Research (Levin recently left New Street after serving as a policy advisor for 10 years). That jumped to about 4.7 million in the U.S. by late August, University of Victoria professor Jianping Pan, who tracks estimated Starlink IP addresses, told PCMag.
The company institutes congestion pricing in areas where customer density still makes it difficult to serve, but its speeds have been improving even as customers increase.
A May Ookla report found that in late 2025, nearly 45 percent of Starlink speedtest results met BEAD’s minimum speed standard of 100 * 20 megabits per second (Mbps), up from 17 percent in the beginning of the year.
A more recent report found that in the first half of 2026, at least 50 percent of Starlink users experienced 100 * 20 Mbps in 17 states, up from just five in the second half of 2025.
Much of Starlink’s subscriber growth comes from households with old copper service or simply nothing at all, Levin said Wednesday.
“Musk gets almost no market share taking people away from fiber or cable,” he said. “It’s really gaining market share from people who have nothing or people who have DSL, and a little bit of fixed wireless.”
Looking ahead
Levin said that when crafting the National Broadband Plan in 2010, he and others working on it weren’t prepared for the potential negative effects of excessive screen time and social media, since research on the issue hadn’t been done yet.
But otherwise he said broadband expansion into rural areas was satisfactory, even if he had imagined it would move even faster. He said goals of universal adoption and more online government services were now backsliding a bit with the loss of the Affordable Connectivity Program.
As for a future national broadband strategy, Levin said it should be focused on ensuring people had communications systems necessary to participate in “an economy and society in which AI is a dominant factor.”
He said the FCC should open an inquiry into what kinds of networks would be necessary to support continued AI use, and how to protect kids and consumers from potential safety risks.
