All those things will go into the Board’s deliberation. I think what you’re touching on though is we are about ready to enter the doorstep where we have choices around what we do with that capital, and that’s the most important thing. And I step back from the year of 2023 and look at the progress that we have made, not just on delivering the commitments that we made back to all of you and our investors, but the fundamental improvements in the structure of our balance sheet, the momentum that we have in the business and to be on the doorstep of those options is a really exciting thing in aggregate for the management team. And I think it shows an incredible amount of progress on the hard work. We have a tremendous amount of optionality in front of us.
As we shared with you, our balance sheet is in really good shape in terms of how we’ve been able to tear (ph) us out our obligations and the rates that we’re paying on it, and how our organic cash flow will allow us to pay down the maturing debt that’s in there. And so as we choose to drive more shareholder value, the field is wide open to us as to where we wish to go and what we wish to do, and we will do what is in the most and best interest of the shareholder at that point in time. And we view it as being a really important moment for us to arrive at. It’s something the management team is focused on and is ensuring that we get there and we all know that it’s incredibly important to driving the value in our stock. On the ACP side, I guess the editorial comment I’ll make is, it’s unfortunate that we’re at this moment, and I say that from the perspective of we have an awful lot of subsidy that’s deliberate and overt, that are in regulatory structures today, which are important to ensure that every American can gain access to the Internet.
And those subsidies, unfortunately in many cases, were set up and structured from many years ago, and they’ve been funded under constructs that have kind of run their time as industry and products have shifted and changed. And from my point of view, regulators right now should be spending their time and energy stepping back from that and understanding how we take all the different subsidy structures in place and get them together in a coherent approach to ensuring those most in need can get subsidy that they need to be able to afford access to the Internet so that as a country, we can step back and say that everybody has access to capable, scalable Internet that allows them to do all the things that are so critical today. And I think through a combination of ACP, universal service reform, other programs that are out there, that money is there, if there was a political will and a coherent policy put forward, that it would be good for the industry and good for our country.
Unfortunately, we now are looking at a triage moment on one program, ACP. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I will tell you, either way it goes, we’ll be fine. We’ve given you guidance fully knowing it can break one way or the other. I’m comfortable that what we can deliver in our plan next year isn’t going to hang on what the government chooses to do with ACP. If they choose to cancel the program and don’t fund it and move forward on it, we have plays that we’ll run. We have things that we’ll do with our customers and how we approach the market and what we do to respond to it. And we believe we can manage through that in an effective way within the context of the size of our company and what we do and how we go to market. If they go the other way and they do manage to fund it or fund it on some kind of a revised basis, AT&T will be continuing to lobby that regulators should be thinking about a more holistic and sustainable approach, trying to get this right for the future so we don’t approach this moment again.
It’s some last minute circumstance and that we can have a thoughtful approach to it. And that battle will not go away, and I think it’s the important thing for all of us to do. On the BEAD side, Simon, I don’t know that a lot has changed other than we’ve seen some incremental progress on a couple of states moving forward in their process. As I shared with you the last time I was asked this question, we’ll probably have 50 different recipes of how BEAD ultimately works its way into the market. There may be some similarity between each of the states, but there clearly is 50 different states and 50 different points of view on this. I think we’re going to be very measured and targeted as to where we go in both in terms of the states that are setting up the right kind of rules that incent the joint private sector investment as well as the right rules that are sustainable for how you operate in that.
I think a good news story is, I point to a state like Texas, I think was the largest benefactor of BEAD financing, seems to me policy wise they have a pretty sound approach to things. It looks to me like we can work effectively in the state. Given it’s a large amount, we’ll probably have good opportunity there. There’s a few other states that I look at and say I’m not sure the policies are going to line up effectively. The end of the day, as I said in my opening comments, we have 10 million to 15 million organic opportunities to go and invest and build. We know what the average cost per past location is for us to build those areas. It’s a very controlled and measurable number. In some of the BEAD circumstances, the amount of private capital per living unit that’s being required is actually substantially higher than what our average cost is and what I would call our organic and market-driven non-BEAD footprint.
