Now that State Broadband Offices are undertaking mapping challenges, I’m sure many of them are seeing the phenomenon that I’m going to describe in today’s blog. When the NTIA decided to allow licensed fixed wireless to be counted as reliable broadband, they made a monstrous mess of the BEAD maps and greatly drove up the cost per passing to implement BEAD.

Before expanding on that claim, let me show you a typical map. This map is a small part of a county where all of the homes would be considered to be unserved if licensed fixed wireless was not considered to be broadband. Every home on this map has zero landline broadband option, and before wireless carriers recently claimed to be providing service, their only broadband option was satellite.

On the map, the blue dots are locations that are still counted as unserved on the State BEAD-eligible map. But the orange locations are all shown as served due to a claim that the homes can be served with fixed wireless.

The map is a real hodgepodge of served and unserved homes. Anybody wanting to claim the BEAD funding for this area can only be funded to reach the blue dots. They can’t claim any costs or get any grant reimbursement for the orange dots.

The key thing to notice is that an ISP that wants to build fiber will still have to build along every road on this map. There is zero savings on fiber construction compared to a network where every home is considered to be unserved. This has a huge ramification for the BEAD grants. While the cost for building fiber is identical in both cases, the cost per passing is almost double when considering only the unserved blue dots. This is important because State Broadband Offices have calculated a target cost per passing to build broadband – and in situations like this one, the cost per passing might have doubled from something like $6,000 per passing to $12,000 per passing. The fiber doesn’t cost more, but the all-important cost per passing goes off the charts, and this area will be considered to be high-cost.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if this is only found in a few places in a state. But I’ve been recently working with ISPs in several Midwest states, and we’re seeing this phenomenon everywhere. In one county I just examined, two-thirds of the county looks just like this map.

I think there are going to be several bad consequences of the NTIA ruling on licensed wireless. First, states have been doing back-of-the-envelope math to see if they have enough money to serve everybody.  If they have large areas similar to this example, the actual cost per passing will much higher than they have assumed, and they will not have nearly enough money.

This is going to be a nightmare when administering a grant in this area. Is a State Broadband Office going to meticulously make sure that it doesn’t pay for pedestals or handholes that might reach a served location? Is a Broadband Office not going to want to fund extra fibers and spices that are used to reach all of the homes?

This also has a huge impact on ISPs pursuing BEAD. A BEAD winner building fiber is clearly going to offer broadband to every home on this map. But that means they will have to cover the full cost of pedestals, drops, and electronics for the supposedly served customers. This means their actual out-of-pocket costs are going to be far higher than what the grant calculation will recognize. If the BEAD calculation recognizes that the ISP is contributing 25% of the cost of the project, the ISP will actually be contributing something much higher for this area.

As an aside, the BEAD map also includes oddities. In this case, the FCC fabric has placed locations far into the middle of farm fields where no homes exist. There are a few homes that don’t show up on this map. There are also a few places where there are multiple dots where there are not multiple homes. In two locations, the FCC has counted the same house as both served and unserved. But ISPs shouldn’t worry about this – the FCC and NTIA assure us that the BEAD maps are solid.

Even worse than all of this, the chances are that nobody knows if the wireless ISP can actually serve any of these locations. The FCC originally was going to require wireless ISPs to provide heat maps from each tower. They also originally had a requirement that a licensed engineer had to sign off that the claimed coverage and speeds are technically feasible. Unfortunately, the FCC excused these requirements, and wireless carriers can claim any coverage and put the burden on ISPs and communities to prove they are exaggerating coverage or speed capabilities – something that is nearly impossible to document. It might turn out that all of the orange dots on this map are unserved – but that’s a whole different BEAD disaster to consider.