Has
anyone figured this out?
Other
than free hardware for any resident at the
location for 10 years, I can’t find what else BEAD
will pay for. What about installation? And are
the monthly fees discounted? I assume it varies
by state, but what’s typically being done?
The
reason I ask is now that my state’s proposed
awards have been publicized in the form of a map,
I can see where they are subsidizing fiber and
where it will be Amazon Kuiper. This figures
bigly into our future plans. Most areas will get
fiber, and while they have 4 years to get it done,
I think most of it will be done in the next 2
years. I’m not going to try and deploy fiber
anywhere that is getting BEAD fiber. It’s another
matter where private money has been overbuilding
cable companies in town that charge north of
$100/mo. They also knew they wouldn’t face BEAD
fiber because the locations weren’t unserved.
But
the areas where there were no bids to do fiber for
below whatever the threshold was for LEO, probably
you’d have to be a fool to do fiber in those areas
with 100% your own money. So that’s where we’d
focus any WISP expansion or upgrades, and what
we’d be competing with is subsidized Amazon
Kuiper. If we’d be competing with a free
satellite receiver, that’s entirely possible. If
it’s 100 Mbps for $10/mo, that’s another matter.
