Perhaps the most unusual element of the new BEAD guidelines is a requirement that BEAD not be used for ‘overbuilding’. The new rules allow an ISP using unlicensed spectrum to stake a claim for areas it already serves and remove those areas from the BEAD map.

Judging if a WISP is really offering service that is considered as served for BEAD is complicated and involves multiple factors. First is speed. There are WISPs that have invested in new radios and backhaul to be able to deliver 100/20 Mbps to everybody. But there are WISPs (and other ISPs) that have been playing a regulatory game by claiming broadband speeds of exactly 100/20 Mbps while delivering something slower.

Second is geographic coverage that identifies the homes a WISP reach from a given radio. A landline network can serve everybody it touches, but terrain can make it increasingly hard for a WISP to reach every home, particularly as the distance from a tower increases. It’s not easy for a WISP to guarantee who it can reach or not reach.

Finally is overall capacity – the ability to be able to serve everybody in a given area. Judging capacity involves a number of factors – the density of homes in the area around a tower, the physical limitation n the connections a radio can make, the brand and age of the radios being used, the amount of backhaul bandwidth, the frequencies being used, and the number of other WISPs in an area that are vying for the same channels of frequency.

Broadband offices have already wrestled with understanding these issues in the original BEAD map challenge that involved WISPs using licensed frequency. But the new map challenge is crazy because State Broadband Offices are going to have to make super-quick decisions. NTIA is giving WISPs only seven days to claim they offer service that should be considered as served under BEAD, and the process is already underway in most states. States are also facing an incredibly short overall time frame and are now supposed to make all grant awards by September 4. That leaves no time to investigate, deliberate, or possibly even fully understand mapping and speed claims made by WISPs.

Contrast this with the BEAD mapping challenges that dragged on for half a year in some States where local governments and ISPs disputed the speed claims in the FCC map. NTIA created a torturously complicated process for the original map challenge to force challengers to prove that locations should be removed or included in the BEAD map. But now, we’re going to have a whirlwind process for excluding possibly millions of locations from BEAD. WISPs won’t have to go through any of the many steps required by the original map challenge, such as getting customers to prove their claims using speed tests.

I’ll be curious to see how many WISPs make a map claim. Removing locations from the BEAD map is not necessarily a good strategy since keeping BEAD locations provides an opportunity for a WISP to pursue BEAD funding under the revised rules that favor fixed wireless and satellite technology.

This quick process is troubling for another reason. I foresee a WISP or other ISP suing a State for making a quick decision about the maps they don’t like. The entire BEAD process has been surprisingly free of lawsuits, but a lawsuit at this late stage would really gum up the works. One area that could lead to lawsuits is the short decision-making time frame that leave WISPs with no chance to appeal a State’s decision. The short process also means that local governments or other ISPs don’t get a chance to review or comment on a State’s decisions.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be chaos. ISPs that still want to participate in BEAD now need to wait until this new map challenge has been resolved to see what is left on the map for BEAD grants. ISPs have been deliberating about where they want to serve for years and could suddenly be facing a different map. NTIA seems to be assuming that ISPs will somehow quickly cope and pivot to a changed map – but that is often going to mean reworking engineering designs and business models in a hurry. There are a lot of ISPs thinking about dropping out of the BEAD process because of the last-minute rule changes.

There has been a lot of criticism of NTIA in the past for being too deliberate. But this new process goes to the other extreme, and introduces major changes in the BEAD map and grant award rules with practically no time for the industry to react or provide input to the States. It seems inevitable that States are going to take widely different approaches to the issue, which makes it even more of a crap shoot for ISPs interested in BEAD.