The US’ National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is in the midst of establishing plans for its Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. With a pot of $42.5 billion, BEAD’s budget has come under fire by fixed-wireless access (FWA) vendor Tarana Wireless. Tarana claims that a fiber-only implementation of BEAD would cost north of $200 billion, some five-times greater than the available funds. Of course, the likes of Tarana would prefer that FWA approaches were chosen over fiber, and so a reader should immediately be uneasy about the claimed cost of $13,900 per home made for fiber. With BEAD having a target of some 16 million homes, that cost would imply a total budget requirement of some $222.4 billion.…