The NTIA recently issued a directive encouraging States to get ISPs to remove locations from BEAD grant applications that can’t be served by broadband. These extra locations might be barns, sheds, or other locations that are not eligible for a BEAD grant. This doesn’t sound like an unreasonable request until you look a little deeper at the issue of identifying and counting passings in farming areas.

It’s been clear to anybody who has looked closely at the FCC mapping fabric in rural areas that there are a lot of errors. The FCC map fabric is supposed to identify every place that is a likely candidate to buy broadband. You can find almost any imaginable issue with the map fabric.

• There are plenty of places where CostQuest has placed a grant-eligible location in the middle of a field, far from any home or business. Those are clearly not supposed to be there.
• But there are plenty of locations where there are rural homes that are not identified as eligible in the fabric.
• The most interesting category are locations that are misplaced, but not really an error. You might find a farm where the barn is considered as the eligible location but not the house. We’ve found places where the identified location is where the farm lane meets the highway instead of at the farmhouse.

The NTIA is asking ISPs to eliminate locations where the maps are clearly incorrect but not letting ISPs add back locations that should be in the fabric. This feels like a way to reduce the amount of grants being awarded instead of trying to get it right.

I’ve had a few ISP clients look at a rural area in detail. Several of them have told me that for every mapping fabric location that doesn’t exist, there is a missing location that should be in the fabric. They’ve concluded that the overall count of BEAD-eligible locations is generally not bad as long as you don’t worry about the errors in both directions.

Local governments and rural ISPs have known about this for a long time. Many local governments tried to fix the FCC fabric during the BEAD map challenge, but were told they couldn’t do it, and that the map challenge was only to identify if a location was served or unserved. State broadband offices told local governments to take such issues up with the FCC – a time-consuming and hit-and-miss process that wouldn’t fix a map in time for the BEAD grant process. Many folks who have tried to fix the FCC fabric have given up because of the complexity of making the requests.

All of this talk about getting the maps exactly right ignores the reality of broadband for farms. I recently talked to the manager of a rural electric cooperative who told me that one of his farmers wants broadband at five different locations, even though he has only one farm house. This farmer is like many others who have fully embraced the benefits of broadband for monitoring sites and performing tasks remotely through broadband. Farmers want broadband at corn dryers, silos, barns, grain silos, feed lots, you name it. I interviewed a farmer last year who told me that he feels more like an IT technician than a farmer most days. Everything this farmer does involves complex software and broadband.

I think it turns out that CostQuest has probably inadvertently identified a lot of farming locations that really are candidates for broadband. Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to wipe out rural locations on the FCC map.