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BEAD hub

How we cover BEAD

BEAD — the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment programme , run by the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) — is our founding beat. This note is the public record of how we report and verify it: where our figures come from, what our labels mean, how we date things, and how we fix mistakes.

Page created 22 September 2026. Last updated: 22 September 2026.

Original sourcing

  • Programme facts (how BEAD works, deadlines, NTIA approvals) trace to the NTIA’s own programme pages or a state broadband office — primary sources first.
  • Award figures on our trackers are transcribed from named sources, row by row. Our current release, 2026.09.19.1, holds 17 Texas provider-level final subgrantee rows ($1,067,572,760 across 208,873 locations), transcribed from Telecompetitor’s 4 June 2026 report quoting the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO). Every row carries its source URL and a verification label — you can check each one.
  • We never present a press report as an official award list. Where a state hasn’t published final awards, we say so plainly: the Texas BDO had not published an official final award list or county breakdown at the time of writing, so our Texas rows carry “press report” labels and the county column reads “Multiple counties (breakdown not published)” — we do not invent the breakdown and we do not prorate.
  • Material caveats travel with the figures. For Texas we flag the August 2026 state disbursement pause (reported by Fierce Network; tied to an audit of alleged favouritism toward Starlink) on every row.

How we build the dataset

  • Our awards feed follows a published schema (v1.0.0): 25 fields per row, per-row source_url, source_type and last_verified required, controlled technology/status vocabularies, and a restatement chain for superseded rows.
  • Dataset releases are immutable and CalVer-versioned. We never quietly edit a published figure: we release a new version and the old one stays downloadable — CSV and JSON at flipnews.co.uk/data/awards/ .
  • 90-day rule: every row is re-verified against its source at least every 90 days, and tracker pages carry a visible “last verified” stamp. A stale stamp means stale data — we’d rather show you that than pretend otherwise.

Date honesty

  • Explainer and tracker pages carry their true dates. We never dress a background guide as fresh news, and background explainers are never pushed into the Latest feed as breaking — that’s a standing newsroom rule.
  • BEAD coverage is organised by series tags (for example bead, starlink, ntia), each series linking back to its hub page — so a story is always one click from the full context.

How we correct

When a figure or fact is wrong, we re-verify against the source, fix it, and log it in our public corrections log. Our general newsroom methodology covers verification standards, image policy, and corrections in full.

Data & trackers

Questions about the data?

See our contact page — corrections go fastest to corrections@flipnews.co.uk .