WASHINGTON, May 13, 2026 – Some Ohio locations awarded to satellite ISPs as part of a $42.45 billion grant program are obstructed by tree cover, a recent analysis found.

Tom Reid, head of Reid Consulting, analyzed about 30,000 of the locations in Ohio that are set to receive service from SpaceX through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, and found as many as 70 percent were covered by tree canopy that would prevent the minimum 110-degree field of view the company’s dishes require.

Depending on the coverage — satellite imagery showed 5 percent of the analyzed locations were completely covered by trees — those homes and businesses could require foliage to be cleared for the service to work properly, Reid said. He said many would at least benefit from a professional installation to find a suitable angle, as setting up dishes on the highest point of a house can be difficult.

“You’re basically doing pirouettes on top of a roof,” he said.

Installation work isn’t covered by the grant funding satellite providers SpaceX and Amazon won to serve rural locations; the money is for consumers’ dishes and capacity to ensure minimum levels of service. Nationally, SpaceX won $739 million to serve 476,000 locations, and Amazon won $312 million to serve 417,000 locations, according to a Connected Nation tally.

SpaceX, controlled by Elon Musk, won a little over 30,000 locations in Ohio after preliminary bidding results, but ended up with 40,000 in the state’s fully approved plan (Reid said he was re-running the analysis). The National Telecommunications and Information Administration had asked states to negotiate down awards that were too expensive on a per-location basis before approving spending plans.

States are now in the process of hammering out their BEAD contracts with ISPs, and it’s not clear whether those agreements will require satellite providers to ensure equipment is installed.

In a contract rider SpaceX proposed to state broadband offices in January, the company asked not to be required to perform installations. Under the company’s proposal, it would have the option to provide installation services for a fee.

SpaceX is still not interested in signing something that would require the company to complete installations itself, according to two state officials familiar with the matter.

Whether or not companies are willing to sign such an agreement, NTIA’s BEAD FAQ says the agency has no problem with BEAD contracts that require ISPs to “ensure — either through provider installation or third-party installation — that subscribers that do not wish to self-install will have fully functioning service within 10 business days,” but that’s not required by the agency. ISPs could charge for that installation service, but not for alterations to a subscriber's property, the document says.

Under BEAD rules, satellite ISPs satisfy minimum requirements by mailing free dishes to subscribers.

SpaceX offers roof installation services at $185 in the continental U.S. or $380 in Alaska and Hawaii, plus the price of the mounting equipment, according to the company’s website.

Maine already has a state-funded program that provides Starlink dishes to rural residents. The Maine Connectivity Authority handles the installation, and the program had about 500 participants in December. The state declined an interview and didn’t mention removing foliage in its statement, but said more than half its participants opted for a professional install.

The program “has seen significant success by offering professional installation services, with the majority of participants requesting assistance to ensure their devices are set up correctly and securely,” an MCA spokesperson said in an email. “The high demand underscores that professional support is a critical component in successfully bridging the digital divide for the state’s most remote residents.”

In a statement, NTIA said it could claw back money if a BEAD location wasn’t getting service that met the minimum requirements, regardless of the reason.

The agency and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “have been very clear: all participants must comply with program rules,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Additionally, BEAD-funded locations will undergo random performance testing by random sampling of the subgrantee’s active subscribers to demonstrate compliance. NTIA can seek to suspend or claw back funding from any subgrantee that fails to meet program requirements.”

One of the state officials noted that under NTIA policy, states can’t impose default penalties beyond what they already paid an ISP. Because satellite operators were able to submit bids far below terrestrial providers’ deployment costs, any money that’s clawed back couldn’t easily be put to use finding an alternative means of connecting a defaulted satellite location, they said.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Ohio broadband office. Reid said he had shown the office his analysis.

In a February Senate hearing, Lutnick publicly shot down SpaceX’s proposed rider because it would have exempted the company from certain BEAD requirements — including removing locations where dishes were obstructed or installed improperly from any performance testing.

At an April 27 NTCA event, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said she also didn’t want to see BEAD contracts that enshrined exceptions to the agency’s rules.

“There are no exceptions,” she said. “You can’t contract out of a BEAD programmatic rule or requirement.”

The Trump administration required an additional round of BEAD bidding under new rules that made it easier for satellite companies to participate, with the goal being to drive down what NTIA saw as unnecessarily high project costs.

States could still decide when to treat satellite bids as “priority broadband projects,” meaning they were allowed to compete on cost with faster but more expensive fiber projects. NTIA had veto power over that determination, and states had to go with a non-priority project if the cost of a priority bid would be excessive.

Many states took canopy cover into account when determining whether satellite bids could be priority projects and sought to deny them that classification in heavy forested areas. In Ohio, SpaceX’s initial winning bids were not priority projects, but it’s not clear whether they faced no priority competition or if there were competing bids that were deemed too expensive.

The company was originally awarded around 31,000 locations, but ended up with 40,000 after states were asked to refine plans and find alternatives to winning bids that exceeded NTIA cost thresholds.

Extra capacity?

A recent Ookla study found that while the majority of U.S, Starlink subscribers still see speeds below BEAD’s minimum of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 20 Mbps upload, the service is quickly improving. In the first quarter of 2025 just 17 percent of Starlink subscribers were seeing median speeds of 100 * 20 Mbps, and the service nearly doubled its subscriber base in that time.

SpaceX also won a big victory at the Federal Communications Commission in April. The agency voted to allow the company to use higher power levels in certain spectrum bands, something the company said would improve the speeds of its broadband service by increasing the capacity of each individual satellite.

Satellite industry analyst Tim Farrar said in an email the new rules “could help to some extent” for dishes with a limited field of view, “although performance is already quite good even in areas with some tree cover and at present the main constraint is simply how many beams each individual satellite can place on the ground.”

Armand Musey, founder of Summit Ridge Group, said something like a 100-degree field of view would likely still be necessary to ensure a dish had line of sight to a sufficient number of satellites. But he said in cases where a dish’s narrow field of view previously included satellites that were at capacit...

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