A question I’ve been asked lately is what comes after BEAD. While BEAD will build good broadband networks in a lot of rural communities, it’s becoming clear that BEAD is not going to solve a lot of the rural broadband gap. I’ve identified categories of locations that will still need better broadband after BEAD.

BEAD Satellite Awards. I start with the premise that rural communities are not going to be happy when somebody officially tells them that the federal government is giving money to Starlink or Kuiper to solve their rural broadband gap. It’s likely that NTIA and the FCC will declare that satellite is good broadband so that they can declare that the rural broadband gap has been solved.

There are also natural limitations on the capabilities of satellite broadband. It can be difficult to deliver a satellite signal through heavy tree canopy. The signal can be blocked for customers living in the shadow of hills or mountains. There are a lot of questions about the maximum number of customers that can be served simultaneously in a given geography. But the real ongoing question will be if people and local politicians will accept satellite broadband when neighboring counties have fiber in rural places. There is also a big question of affordability.

I predict there will be a growing outcry from people from areas that got satellite from BEAD who will not accept satellite as the permanent solution.

Defaults. There will continue to be defaults for existing broadband grant programs. This year saw significant RDOF defaults from Charter and CenturyLink. There will be defaults on networks funded by ARPA grants, where funding ends at the end of 2026.

I expect BEAD defaults. When NTIA took the approach of forcing ISPs to accept less funding, many of those ISPs will realize in the future that they don’t have enough money to build the promised network.

Crappy Mapping. The biggest group of locations missed by BEAD will be due to poor FCC maps. The BEAD map challenge was a total joke. It was fairly easy for ISPs to get BEAD-eligible locations removed from the map, including many that should have stayed on. The map challenge made it practically impossible to add locations to the BEAD map where the FCC maps were in error. There are two major flaws in the FCC maps that will surface as people complain about still not having adequate broadband.

There are still numerous examples of locations that are not identified on the FCC maps. I recently talked to a cooperative in Appalachia that said there were neighboring areas where the FCC fabric missed 30% of the eligible locations. This is understandable because CostQuest relies on two primary sources of data on housing: local records and satellite images. There are many counties that still have poor records. Satellite images don’t do well in areas with total tree cover that hides roads and houses from the satellite imagery.

The bigger mapping issue is ISPs that have claimed speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster in the FCC maps but can’t deliver that speed. FCC rules allow ISPs to report marketing speeds rather than an approximation of actual speeds, so such ISPs are probably not violating any FCC rules. But while fully knowing that marketing speeds are likely exaggerated, in the grant process, we pretend that the speeds reported in the FCC maps are gospel. When the RDOF subsidy program was announced, which was to provide a subsidy to locations where speeds were less than 25/3 Mbps, the large rural telcos flooded the FCC mapping process with claims that upgraded the claimed speeds of huge numbers of locations to exactly 25/3 Mbps broadband. The FCC rejected a lot of these claims that were made on the eve of the RDOF reverse auction. When BEAD rules dictated that grants could only be made to locations where broadband speeds were less than 100/20 Mbps, many rural ISPs scrambled to claim that they could deliver exactly 100/20 Mbps.

ISPs also often overstate coverage areas in the FCC maps. An ISP is only supposed to claim locations it can connect to within ten days after a request. There are many examples of WISPs in the FCC maps that draw perfect coverage circles around a tower that ignore topography and foliage. There are many other ISPs that claim service areas that are aspirational rather than real.

The bottom line is that we will still be a long way from being able to declare the job done after the BEAD awards. To be fair, BEAD, ReConnect, ARPA, and other grants have made some huge dents in the rural broadband gap. But the day will come when the millions of people who have been left behind will make themselves heard.