HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania will spend $793 million to bring high-speed internet to homes and businesses as part of a major federal initiative to connect even the most remote and rural areas of the U.S. The investment will connect 130,000 locations across the commonwealth that still cannot access the internet at broadband speeds.
After federal officials announced sweeping changes to the massive program over the summer, critics feared those dollars would shift heavily toward low Earth orbit satellite internet providers. They argued that would short-change rural residents and undermine a historic opportunity to ensure universal broadband access.
Now, the results are in and those fears have been partly realized — although in Pennsylvania the shift is not as dramatic as some predicted.
Roughly two-thirds of eligible locations in the commonwealth will be connected to the internet via fiber-optic cables, while another 18% will be served by satellite providers and 13% will receive wireless internet.
“Pennsylvania struck a relatively reasonable balance here, but the proof will be in the pudding once these get built,” said Todd Eachus, president of the Broadband Communications Association of Pennsylvania, a trade association.
The mix of companies that won funding reflects the Trump administration’s overhaul of the program, which was originally created as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law passed by Congress in 2021. It’s the largest ever U.S. investment in broadband.
Under former President Joe Biden, states were told to prioritize projects that would use fiber-optic cables — the fastest and most reliable technology, but also the most expensive to install.
The new rules, unveiled in June, give more weight to the projects with the lowest up-front costs, making the satellite internet service offered by companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper more competitive.
The results have varied widely across states. Some, including West Virginia and Louisiana, still want to fund fiber projects at more than 80% of eligible locations. Others have awarded larger chunks of their locations to satellite and wireless providers.
Pennsylvania falls somewhere in the middle.
Critics say using the program to fund satellite internet providers is shortsighted, since it’s not clear that those companies will be able to meet future demands for faster internet speeds as technology evolves.
Pennsylvania broadband officials appeared to agree with this view, state records show. The infrastructure law says states should prioritize projects that can “easily scale speeds over time” and the state broadband authority didn’t place any satellite projects in this category.
Nonetheless, Amazon’s Project Kuiper — which is not yet available to customers — won the second-highest number of locations, behind established internet giant Comcast.
Under Pennsylvania’s plan, Project Kuiper will serve more than 18,000 locations — including large swathes of Beaver, Greene, and Washington Counties — and SpaceX will cover about 4,800.
In a public comment on Pennsylvania’s plan, one resident criticized the proposed awards to Project Kuiper because the service “isn’t even fully functional,” calling it a “step in the wrong direction just to ensure that ‘internet for all’ is achieved on paper.”
The company has said it expects to begin delivering service to customers later this year.
Labor unions also criticized the awards to satellite providers, arguing that neither SpaceX nor Project Kuiper “builds local infrastructure, creates local jobs, or offers cost-effective long-term service compared to fiber broadband.”
In its comments, SpaceX urged the federal government to require Pennsylvania to rebid some locations, arguing that the state had not always chosen the cheapest option. The company used almost identical language to push back on proposed awards in Colorado and Wisconsin, and has also criticized Louisiana and Virginia’s plans on the grounds that both favored fiber internet over satellite.
Whether satellite internet technology can consistently meet the program’s minimum speed requirements is unclear.
During the first three months of the year, only 17.4% of SpaceX users were consistently able to get speeds that meet the federal definition of broadband, according to an analysis by Ookla, a company that measures internet speeds. The analysis did note, however, that median upload and download speeds had increased significantly over the past several years.
Adding more customers, other research has found, can create congestion that leads to slower speeds for existing users.
“If four out of five subscribers aren’t getting broadband speeds today, what do people think is going to happen when you add in hundreds of thousands of new users?” said Sascha Meinrath, a professor at Penn State and co-author of a recent study questioning whether SpaceX can meet the program’s requirements.
“The problem gets far worse the more people you put onto the infrastructure.”
A SpaceX spokesperson told Spotlight PA via email that median download speeds, even during times of peak demand, exceeded the program’s requirements as of July 2025. The company is focused on “ensuring the overall quality of service for new and existing customers continually improves,” the spokesperson said.
Pennsylvania’s plan must now be approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which has pledged to review states’ proposals within 90 days.
The agency has warned that it could reject specific grant awards if it deems the cost “excessive” and some reports indicate it has begun asking states to quickly rebid awards for those areas. The agency has not commented publicly on this process.