D.C. Memo: New Mexico Broadband Leader Defends His Internet for All Plan: 'Why Not Both?'
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BEAD: New Mexico's top broadband official is defending his Internet for All plan for his state. Under the plan, the state would spend $70 million in 2025 and 2026 to provide a free Starlink dish to 95,000 unserved or underserved locations and later use a portion of the state's $675.4 million in BEAD money to give those same locations access to fiber or an alternative terrestrial technology. Asked if that was wasteful spending, Drew Lovelace, New Mexico's Acting Director of the Office of Broadband Access and Expansion (OBAE), said his plan was designed to meet an urgent need in the state."You're saying it's one or the other but not both. We're saying this is really important for two years to make sure New Mexicans can be online and be connected and we can actually move forward in getting them into the digital space," Lovelace said Monday in an interview with Policyband. "It should be a 'Why not both?'" Incoming FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has knocked New Mexico's approach as wasteful, comparing it to a government program that built a homeowner two adjacent driveways a few years apart. Lovelace said he was not concerned that BEAD-funded fiber projects could fail because Starlink had too much of the market as a result of the state's own satellite subsidy program. "I think you will see a lot of these [fiber] providers being able to compete very easily because they will have scalable speeds that are greater than Starlink and their recurring monthly costs are going to be less." Starlink today costs $120 a month. Lovelace said he did not believe current BEAD rules required New Mexico to remove Starlink-subsidized locations from the map that pinpoints unserved locations.
