(Credit: Brian Westover/PCMag)
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Montana is awarding SpaceX's Starlink $33.7 million to bring high-speed internet to 20,000 underserved locations in the state.
The funding is part of the US Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which will use federal funds to expand high-speed internet to over 70,000 locations in Montana.
The state joins Colorado in largely favoring satellite internet services over fiber installations. In Montana, Starlink will serve over 28% of BEAD locations while Amazon’s Project Kuiper will get nearly 37%. However, Kuiper gets a smaller slice of funding at $15.9 million.
In total, Montana’s BEAD program selected satellite internet for about 65% of the underserved locations, higher than Colorado’s 50%. The states did so after the Trump administration overhauled the BEAD program to favor “technology neutrality” and lower costs, opening the door for satellite internet services to receive a larger portion of funding.
In Montana’s case, the state says it’ll only need $308 million, thus “saving over $300 million in deployment costs” since it originally received $629 million from the BEAD program.
Still, Montana and Colorado are outliers compared with other US states, which will rely more on fiber than satellite internet services for their BEAD programs.
For example, Oklahoma on Wednesday announced its own proposal, which shows it picked Starlink for only one location while Kuiper was selected for 4,237. “Fiber optic technology will be provided to 65% of awarded locations, while fixed wireless will serve 20% and 15% will receive low-earth orbit satellite service,” Oklahoma’s BEAD office added.
The decision in some states to pick fiber over Starlink has prompted SpaceX to claim that BEAD funding is being misused on expensive fiber installations. The company has demanded that Louisiana and Virginia revise their BEAD proposals and even called for the Commerce Department to intervene. The agency hasn’t responded to requests for comment, but it will need to sign off on all the states’ BEAD proposals before the federal funding is released.
Critics have slammed SpaceX for trying to take funding away from fiber installations, which can offer gigabit speeds without network congestion. A consumer can also already buy access to Starlink, which has long been available across the US; no federal subsidy is needed. That said, SpaceX is working to upgrade Starlink to support gigabit internet with improved capacity.
Under the BEAD program, satellite providers such as Starlink and Project Kuiper will need to supply the satellite dish antenna for free to each underserved location while reserving network capacity. They’re under no obligation to offer discounts to subscribers. The revised BEAD program also removed a state's ability to set the pricing for internet plans meant for low-income users.
Editors' Note: This story was changed after Montana initially listed Starlink and Kuiper's funding levels at $119 million and $26 million, respectively. The state's broadband office later told PCMag it revised the numbers to a lower amount, writing: "There was an error in the initial data file posting. The ConnectMT team was made aware of the error during the public comment process and made the appropriate data adjustments as part of their final proposal submission."