West Virginia Received Few Non-Fiber BEAD Applications

NASHVILLE, June 3, 2025 – West Virginia received little interest from non-fiber providers during bidding for Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment grants, according to a 90-page document of state’s draft final proposal.

West Virginia received applications from 11 companies for 219 projects, according to the draft proposal, published Monday on the web site of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. 

The entire process was open to providers using any technology. All but one of those applications proposed last-mile fiber projects. All the winning projects were entirely fiber.

The state’s all-fiber plan has been withdrawn and is currently being revised to line up with the Trump administration’s priorities, which include more funding for non-fiber technologies like fixed wireless and satellite. The state was the first to receive an extra 90 days to submit a final plan after West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey (R) met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in March.

West Virginia hasn’t publicly solicited additional applications from ISPs. The state’s broadband office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the Fiber Broadband Association’s national convention here, CEO Gary Bolton said the West Virginia draft demonstrated the state’s solid work.

“West Virginia is ground zero when it comes to BEAD funding and fiber deployment,” Bolton told Broadband Breakfast. “From education to health care to small business growth, fiber infrastructure is a game changer for rural communities. We encourage Secretary Lutnick to continue to move forward with the program by allowing states to meet the broadband needs of their residents.”

Ultimately the state selected nine awardees to receive funding for 108 projects, all of which used fiber. Like final proposals that other states released, the draft plan itself doesn’t say which providers were selected.

Current BEAD rules allow states to allocate funds to non-fiber

Current BEAD rules prioritize fiber, but states are allowed to fund other technologies if no fiber providers are interested in a given area or if fiber would be too expensive.

States decide at what point fiber becomes too expensive by setting what’s called an extremely high cost per location threshold, a per-location cost at which a fiber project would lose out to a cheaper proposal using a different technology.

West Virginia set its threshold at $28,000 per location, which it said was the price point at which it would become more difficult to achieve universal coverage within its budget. The state set the threshold before evaluating its applications.

The state didn’t end up using its threshold to make project decisions, as it never encountered a situation where a fiber project over the threshold was competing with a non-fiber project for the same area.

The broadband office did include areas that only received applications over the threshold in a second application round, and negotiated with local ISPs to expand their nearby footprints into those areas if a less expensive application didn’t come in for the second round. The state said in both cases the efforts resulted in the awarded project coming in under the high-cost threshold, but ultimately in a small number of areas “all viable outcomes” involved exceeding it. 

Locations exceeding $28,000 ‘do not significantly affect the ability of the state to meet… objectives,’ proposal said

“The number of Target Locations in Projects selected for funding that exceed the [high-cost threshold] are relatively few and therefore do not significantly affect the ability of the state to meet its coverage objectives within the budget,” the state wrote.

The state’s average per-location cost was $9,182. West Virginia planned to spend $946 million of its $1.2 billion BEAD allocation on the winning projects, plus more than $60 million from other federal sources brought in to ease the program’s matching requirement. The projects would reach all of the state’s 110,220 eligible homes and businesses – those without access to existing or under construction broadband infrastructure.

The $42.45 billion BEAD program has been on hold at the federal level while the Trump administration plans to alter its rules to, among other things, take a more “tech-neutral approach,” as opposed to the current fiber preference. Marissa Mitrovich, FBA’s vice president of public policy, said the group was expecting that guidance could come down as soon as the end of this week.

More than 40 states have begun or finished fielding applications under the current rules, and it’s not clear if the new guidance will require them to redo any work.

Despite not putting out a call for new bids, Morrisey, the West Virginia governor, suggested in a recent op-ed that the state was trying to include non-fiber projects in its revised plan. He wrote the state was “expanding the definition of service to include not only fiber but also fixed wireless and satellite, particularly in our mountainous and remote regions where traditional infrastructure is impractical or cost-prohibitive.”

West Virginia’s draft plan said of fixed wireless and low-earth orbit satellite that “The state has a highly mountainous terrain (with 78.5 percent of the state covered in forest), and faces a wide range of weather events, such as snow and rain; all of which can significantly degrade speeds utilizing those services.”