- NTIA has now approved all 56 BEAD final proposals
- In Illinois, the state will be left with about $169 million in non-deployment funds
- The mix of technologies in Illinois changed from December 2025 to August 2026
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it has approved Illinois’ Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) final proposal. NTIA has now approved the BEAD final proposals of all 56 states and territories.
The state of Illinois received a total BEAD allocation of slightly more than $1 billion. Its final proposal will result in total deployment costs of $831 million, covering 142,546 eligible broadband locations. This will result in about $169 million in non-deployment funds.
What technology changed with Illinois' BEAD funding?
It’s interesting that from the time Illinois submitted its final proposal in December 2025 until today when it was finally approved by NTIA, the mix of technologies changed substantially.
In the approved final proposal, fiber will account for 68.1% of locations; fixed wireless access (FWA) will account for 23.6%; and low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite will snag 8.1% of locations. (See the chart below.)
Shown below is Illinois’ December 2025 proposal where fiber accounted for 74.8% of locations; LEO accounted for 15.1%; and FWA accounted for 9.8% of locations.
At the end of the day, both fiber and LEO are getting less locations than were originally requested, while FWA is getting more.
The changes could be due to the fact that updated mapping information has resulted in less locations being approved for satellite.
Fierce reached out to the Illinois Office of Broadband and will update this story if they respond.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity released a statement saying, “Illinois fought for months to obtain federal approval of its BEAD application, which was originally submitted in September 2025. Despite the federal policy committing to completing application reviews within 90 days of submission, Illinois waited almost one year to secure this critical funding.”
NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said today, “With all 56 final proposals now approved, we are achieving Congress’s vision of closing the digital divide once and for all.”
Read more about NTIA and BEAD on Fierce Network
NTIA approves California’s final BEAD proposal
Satellite operators might not take such a big slice of BEAD after all
Opinion: We've given huge hunks of BEAD to satellite. Now what?