Virginia chose the Elon Musk-headed company for only 5,579 of the total 133,000 locations selected for subsidized broadband installations.<\/p>\n
SpaceX warned on Wednesday that Virginia is planning to spend over ten times what was required for its proposed high-speed internet access program by not sharing a large chunk of the incentives for Starlink.<\/p>\n
In a letter addressed to the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, SpaceX said that the final proposal for the program was a \u201cmassive waste of federal taxpayer money,\u201d before noting that SpaceX could have served virtually every eligible household at $60 million, compared with the $613 million in expenditure proposed by the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimply put, Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow-to-build fiber bias over speedy, low-cost, and technology-neutral competition,\u201d SpaceX wrote in the latter as Virginia chose the Elon Musk-headed company for only 5,579 of the total 133,000 locations selected for subsidized broadband installations.<\/p>\n
The program at the center of the controversy is called the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD), an $42.5 billion initiative of the Biden administration to enhance internet access for Americans across the country. The Trump administration tweaked the program to shift from fibre-based broadband to \u2018technology neutrality\u2019 and paved the way for satellite broadband providers such as Starlink and fixed wireless service providers.<\/p>\n