Wecom Fiber Wins $195M BEAD Fiber Fund in Arizona

Fiber-Centric Strategy

The $195 million earmarked for Wecom represents more than individual service drops; it represents a significant expansion of Arizona’s overall fiber footprint. The BEAD program requires infrastructure that can support high-demand, low-latency uses for decades without major overhauls, which effectively positions fiber as the only scalable long-term solution for many rural regions.

Arizona’s broadband office has emphasized several goals with this award cycle:

• Future-proof capacity for rural communities
• Network resiliency in wildfire, desert, and high-altitude regions
• Long-term cost efficiency over the life of the infrastructure
• Workforce development tied to ongoing construction and maintenance needs

Wecom’s projects will lay thousands of miles of fiber backbone and lateral extensions into communities that have historically relied on copper, fixed wireless, or satellite links—technologies that are increasingly unable to meet modern service benchmarks.

Arizona’s unserved areas are widely distributed and often located in high-cost, low-density regions. Tribal communities, mountain towns, and remote desert communities pose engineering and permitting challenges that can stall deployment without strong operational capacity.

The BEAD awards announced this month represent Arizona’s first large-scale attempt to address those gaps in a coordinated plan rather than through piecemeal projects. The total $967 million awarded in this round reflects a deliberate approach: concentrate funding into deployments that build durable, statewide fiber coverage rather than temporary or stopgap technologies.

Wecom, founded in Kingman nearly 70 years ago, is one of the Arizona-based providers with both regional knowledge and large-scale operational experience. Supported by Searchlight Capital Partners—an investor with a dedicated broadband infrastructure portfolio—the company is positioned to execute multi-county construction at the speed BEAD timelines require.

What Comes Next

With NTIA approval secured and awards issued, Arizona’s BEAD program now enters the engineering and deployment phase. Over the next several months, providers will complete:

• Final fiber route designs
• Environmental and cultural assessments
• Workforce expansion in construction-critical counties
• Procurement of materials within NTIA’s Build America, Buy America (BABA) requirements
• Phased construction schedules for 2026–2029

If completed as planned, these projects will significantly reduce the number of unserved rural locations in Arizona and provide a long-term foundation for regional economic development, digital public services, and future network expansion.