An article from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at the New York Law School claims that over 1 million locations were missed by the BEAD grants. They identified these as locations that are still shown as unserved and underserved on the FCC broadband maps, but which did not make it into the BEAD program.

ACLP also identified two other sources of locations that will likely not get broadband. They predict some BEAD defaults since a number of small and untested ISPs won sizable BEAD grants. They also believe there will continue to be defaults in other grant programs.

ACLP recommends that up to half of the $20 billion+ that will not be spent on BEAD grant be deposited into a BEAD Reserve Fund to be used to cover the shortfalls.

It’s a sensible idea, but unlikely to gain any momentum. It seems clear that NTIA wants to take credit for solving the rural broadband gap while also returning $20 billion to the U.S. Treasury. I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow NTIA to keep unspent monies alive once BEAD grants are awarded and NTIA makes a final announcement on non-deployment funds. The general consensus I’m hearing is that NTIA will award little or nothing to non-deployment funds.

I think ACLP is missing the bigger picture, and I think there are many millions more locations that should have rightfully been included in BEAD.

ACLP’s math starts with the assumption that the speeds reported to the FCC in the broadband maps are right. Anybody who has worked at a local level knows this is often not the case. There are a lot of ISPs that claim a speed of exactly 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps, and I believe that millions of these locations have been falsely excluded from BEAD.

Each State had a BEAD map challenge that was supposed to result in an accurate map, but that process was largely a total bust. The map challenge rules made it much easier to exclude locations from the preliminary BEAD maps than add locations. The process of proving an ISP was overstating speed capabilities in the FCC maps was nearly impossible to comply with.

Additionally, NTIA declared that licensed fixed wireless was to be treated as served as long as speeds were reported at 100/20 Mbps. In many counties I worked with for the map challenges, it became obvious that reporting by some WISPs was a joke. I remember one WISP that drew an eleven-mile radius circle around every tower and claimed the ability to serve every place in that circle. Numerous WISPs used seven- and nine-mile circles and also claimed full coverage. The irony of the NTIA ruling was that the only requirement to block off big areas from BEAD was adding CBRS spectrum to the spectrum mix. Many WISPs tell me that CBRS is an unremarkable spectrum due to the small channel sizes.

The other big category of locations that could have been covered by BEAD was low-income MDUs. The BEAD legislation suggested that States attack this issue using non-deployment funds. The number of such locations is hard to identify because many MDUs show as served in the FCC map since there is fiber nearby. But an MDU is not served until somebody is willing to invest in the inside wiring needed to bring better broadband to residents.

My guess is that the number of locations missed by BEAD is likely 6 to 7 million, much higher than the number suggested by ACLP. I have no analytical basis for that guess other than I seem to find examples of places missed by BEAD in every community I dig deeply into.

At some point, this will all come clear as folks without good broadband continue to complain to their elected officials. RDOF was supposed to fix the digital divide. BEAD was supposed to solve it. Maybe the next time will be the charm, although I’m not taking any bets on it.