Virginia’s federal broadband money, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program known as BEAD, covers 78 locations in Lee County, and 75 of them are slated for satellite service. By The Lee Daily Register’s count from the state’s awards spreadsheet, SpaceX is listed for 68 and Amazon for 7. Scott County Telephone Cooperative, a fiber provider, is listed for the other three.
Lee’s 78 is fewer than Wise County’s 194 and Scott County’s 246. The state’s BEAD page says locations left off its award map are either already served or will be reached by an existing expansion project, and a large state fiber award covering all three counties came before BEAD.
How Lee compares with Wise and Scott
The Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) posted the spreadsheet with its BEAD final proposal, which the state announced on Nov. 19, 2025 had won federal approval. We added up the SpaceX and Amazon columns to get each county’s satellite share:
| Area | BEAD locations | SpaceX | Amazon | Scott County Telephone | Satellite share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lee County | 78 | 68 | 7 | 3 | 96% |
| Wise County | 194 | 120 | 59 | 15 | 92% |
| Scott County | 246 | 76 | 1 | 169 | 31% |
| Virginia | 85,069 | 4,951 | 6,038 | 187 | 13% |
The state’s announcement cites more than 133,000 locations, while the spreadsheet totals 85,069, and DHCD’s page does not explain the gap. SpaceX and Amazon both operate satellite networks, and DHCD’s BEAD fact sheet lists low Earth orbit satellite systems among the technologies in the awards.
The fiber project that came first
The earlier money came in two steps. In January 2021, DHCD announced $1,230,563 for the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission and Scott County Telephone to lay 73 miles of fiber in Lee County, reaching 679 serviceable units. In December 2021, a larger award went to the same pair: $22,190,500, plus $6,354,500 in leveraged funds, to build fiber to 10,982 unserved locations across Lee, Wise and Scott counties.
Federal money followed. In August 2023, Cardinal News reported a $25 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to Scott County Telephone for fiber in Wise and Lee counties and Norton. LENOWISCO’s director said it would complement the state funds. None of the DHCD reports below covers that grant, and we did not find a progress report for it.
How far the December 2021 build had come
In that round the state counted a location as unserved if it lacked 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload service, a bar later raised to 100/20, according to a footnote in DHCD’s April 2026 quarterly report. That series shows the project’s reported progress:
| DHCD report | Data through | Locations with access |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 fiscal 2026 | August 2025 | 6,671 (61%) |
| Q2 fiscal 2026 | November 2025 | 7,352 (67%) |
| Q3 fiscal 2026 | January 2026 | 6,533 (59%) |
| Capital Projects Fund 2025-26 report | Cites June 30, 2026 payments | 11,113 of 10,982 planned |
The April report rated the project high risk, named make-ready work on utility poles and railroad crossings as the delays, and showed a contract end date of June 30, 2026, pushed back from Dec. 13, 2025 in the earlier reports. It does not say why the count fell between the November and January snapshots. The same report notes that the federal pandemic-relief funds in this round must be spent by Dec. 31, 2026. The reports we read do not break results out by county, so we cannot say how many of the 11,113 locations are in Lee.
What a location costs under each program
Dividing each award by its locations, by The Lee Daily Register’s calculation, shows how different the programs are:
- 2021 Lee County grant: $1,230,563 over 679 units, about $1,812 each.
- December 2021 three-county grant: $22,190,500 over 10,982 locations, about $2,021 each, or $2,599 counting the leveraged funds.
- BEAD satellite awards, statewide: $7.72 million over 10,989 locations, about $703 each.
- All other BEAD awards, statewide: $537.5 million over 74,080 locations, about $7,255 each.
The BEAD figures come from the project file in DHCD’s final proposal data uploads. They do not give dollars by county, so Lee’s own BEAD cost cannot be worked out. The programs also differ in years, speed standards and match rules, so the numbers are not a like-for-like ranking.
What we could not check
The FCC’s National Broadband Map has a county summary, but its site would not load for us on Oct. 29, so this story does not use it and cannot say how many Lee locations are unserved today. A text search of the agendas and minutes on the county’s meeting page from December 2024 through Oct. 26, 2026 found no use of the word broadband, though a few posted files could not be searched.
Residents can look up an address on the state’s Commonwealth Connection map. A new state grant round opened Oct. 7, 2026, with applications reviewed as they arrive until Oct. 7, 2027, according to DHCD’s VATI page. In earlier rounds a local government was the lead applicant, according to the Capital Projects Fund report.
