Tag Archives: Map Challenge

Where Are the Missing BEAD Locations?

It seems that almost everybody I’ve talked to in the last week is wondering what NTIA is up to when the agency said that non-deployment funds can be used to serve locations missed by the first round of BEAD grants. The common question I’m being asked is where NTIA and State Broadband Offices are going to find more BEAD-eligible locations. It’s a great question.

I can only think of three sources of locations for that were missed by BEAD the first time around. One group of locations are the ones being turned back to State Broadband Offices when BEAD awardees decide not to accept a BEAD grant. The broadband offices have been trying to find other ISPs to take these locations at the original award price. But I already know of several examples where there are no takers – at least at the dollar level of BEAD that was awarded after the Benefit of the Bargain round. Perhaps NTIA will loosen the purse strings a bit to allow for higher awards for some of these locations. I’ve also hear speculation that unclaimed BEAD locations will all go to satellite.

This option is risky for NTIA. The first time an offer is made to a new ISP that is higher than the original award, ISPs everywhere are going to be clamoring for more money. One of the cooperative associations recently made that request. I can foresee lawsuits arising if NTIA allows increases in funding for some locations but not others.

Another potential source of locations comes from each update of the FCC mapping fabric, when new locations are added to the FCC map. Some of these are new construction, and others are corrections of the fabric. I can’t imagine that is a whole lot of places in this category, but there are always going to be some with each new map. What’s not being talked about is that with every release of a new fabric, there are also locations that are being removed from BEAD. NTIA is quietly whittling away at the BEAD grants that have already been awarded, and almost everybody I know with a BEAD grant is seeing some reduction in eligible BEAD locations.

The only other source of new BEAD locations I can think of would be from fixing the many errors introduced in the BEAD map challenge process. The only word I can use to describe the map challenge process is ludicrous. NTIA created a set of rules to challenge the BEAD maps that were impossible to comply with. I know counties, cooperatives, and other ISPs that made numerous claims to the map challenge that were denied. Many of these challenges tried to add legitimate locations that were missing from the fabric.

A much larger number of challenges tried to add locations where an ISP was falsely claiming speed capabilities of 100/20 Mbps or faster that were overstated. A successful speed challenge required a local government to find actual customers of suspect ISPs and get them to take a complicated series of speed tests at defined times and intervals. That whole process was largely unachievable, particularly when the map challenge process was rushed through. In my opinion, the folks who designed the map challenge rules were either completely out of touch with the real world, or else the process was rigged on purpose to hold down the number of BEAD-eligible locations. I’ve seen some credible estimates that there are at least a million locations that were incorrectly thrown off the BEAD map. My own back-of-the-envelope estimate, which is admittedly based only on work in about twenty counties, is that this could be more than two million locations.

I can’t imagine a process where NTIA reopens the map challenge with challenge rules that work. I could see that process dragging out for a year.

There is an easier way to do a map challenge, which would be for NTIA to buy the entire Ookla speed test database of actual speed tests and compare it against ISP speed claims in the fabric. I’ve already written a future blog about how that might work. But I suspect this would lead to lawsuits and chaos as ISPs fight to not get overbuilt with BEAD grant funding.

My gut reaction when I heard this announcement is that won’t amount to a hill of beans. I talked to several people who think this announcement is just another way for the NTIA to put off the announcement of how they will spend the remaining $22 billion in nondeployment funds. NTIA had promised to make that announcement before the end of summer – which is next week. I sure hope this was not that announcement, because I don’t think there is any hidden stash of BEAD-eligible locations that will use more than a tiny amount of the nondeployment funds.

The New BEAD Map Challenge

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.

Community Action for the 5G Plan

I took the unusual step of publish two blogs today. The FCC announced the 5G Fund to improve cellular broadband in rural areas – and this second blog talks about several actions communities might want to consider immediately if your area needs better cellular coverage.

The FCC announced it will move forward with the 5G Plan for Rural America. This new subsidy will provide $9 billion to improve rural cellular coverage. I know in working throughout rural America that poor cellular coverage is often a worse problem that broadband coverage.

The FCC is convinced that the current cellular coverage maps are adequate to define the areas that deserve the new subsidy. In the counties I’ve been working in this does not seem to be the case, and the FCC cellular maps often seem to be overstating speed, similar to broadband speed claims. This was bolstered by a recent letter to the FCC from the Rural Wireless Association that claims that the FCC cellular maps are poor.

Since the FCC seems determined to move forward with the current maps and seems to be on a fast track to initiate the 5G plan,  there should be a sense of urgency in any County that thinks it needs better cellular coverage. The following steps should be considered immediately because it is possible that the FCC could launch the new 5G Fund by the end of the year.

First is to look at the FCC cellular map. This is part of the same map system used to show broadband coverage. Type in any address in a county, and a detailed map will appear. Choose the Mobile Broadband button at the top and you’ll be able to see the claimed cellular coverage at any address. The 5G Fund will bring better cellular coverage to locations where there is no 5G today (just 4G LTE) or where 5G speeds are claimed to be slower than 7/1 Mbps. You can look at the parts of your county where you believe cellular coverage is poor and see if the FCC map agrees with your local knowledge.

The 5G Fund subsidy will only be awarded to areas where the FCC map shows that no carrier is offering 5G with speeds of at least 7/1 Mbps. If even only one carrier meets that criteria, the area will not get funding. You might see some cellular carriers you don’t recognize in the FCC map like Project Genesis (which is Dish) or local cellular carriers.

A next step might be to dash off quick comments to the FCC about the 5G Fund timeline. Surprisingly, the FCC is not planning to have a map challenge period for counties to contest the cellular map coverage. Comments are due to the FCC by September 10. If nothing else, tell the FCC they should include some time for a map challenge. The FCC has been talking about launching this fund for four years, and it seems irresponsible to suddenly rush without giving local governments a chance to verify and challenge the FCC cellular maps.

There was a comment made in this docket that said local governments have had plenty of time to dispute the maps since the new FCC maps have been out for several years. However, all of the counties I have been working with have been concentrating on the FCC broadband maps. Almost nobody has looked hard at claimed cellular speeds – until this order came out, nobody knew what to look for on the maps. Making a comment in an FCC docket is relatively easy to do. The first thing on the form is to ask for the proceeding, which in this case is 20-32 Establishing a 5G Fund for Rural America.

Finally, if the FCC maps overstate cellular coverage in your area you need to get folks out taking cellular speed tests using the FCC app in the areas where you think coverage is poor. To be of any use for the 5G Fund the speed tests probably need to be done this month.

Speed tests can only be done using the FCC’s own speed test app. The app is available at the Google Play Store or Apple App store. Speed tests only count if they area taken outside or in a moving vehicle – indoor tests or tests on a WiFi network don’t county. For the 5G Fund, you want to take speed tests from a stationary point, which means pulling over on the side of the road. Tests must be taken between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM.

You need to have phones subscribed to each carriers you want to dispute. If Dish is the only carrier claiming coverage in a rural area, the only tests that mean anything must be conducted from a Dish phone. Make sure when using the app that you are filing a challenge – it’s possible to use the app to check speeds without the results being sent to the FCC.

Finally, the FCC considers cellular map challenges as a crowd-sourced process. That means a lot of tests are required from each carrier in each disputed area. Taking a handful of tests won’t register with the FCC. Unfortunately, we don’t know how many tests are enough. I have no idea what happens if you try to test a carrier where there is no signal since your phone won’t be connected to broadband.

 

Gaming the BEAD Maps

From all over the country, I’m hearing stories about ISPs who are gaming the FCC broadband maps in order to block area from being eligible for the BEAD grants. It’s relatively easy for an ISP to do this. All that’s needed is to declare the capability to deliver a speed of 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps.

ISPs can largely do this with impunity since there is nothing wrong with them doing this. The archaic FCC rules allow ISPs to claim ‘up-to’ marketing speeds in the maps, and ISPs can self-determine the speed they want to declare.

A lot of ISPs decided to start claiming 100/20 Mbps capabilities in the last update to the FCC maps. This is being done across technologies. We’ve suddenly found rural DSL claimed at speeds of 100/20 Mbps and faster. Older DOCSIS 3.0 cable networks that previously declared upload speeds of 8 or 10 Mbps are suddenly in the FCC maps with 20 Mbps upload speeds. Some WISPs and FWA cellular carriers are claiming speeds of 100/20 Mbps across a large geographic footprint that doesn’t match the capabilities from its tower locations.

It’s not hard to understand the motivation for this. We’ve seen this before. Just before the FCC was to announce the eligible areas for the RDOF reverse auction, CenturyLink and Frontier declared that tens of thousands of Census blocks suddenly had the capability to deliver speeds of 25/3 Mbps. This was the speed in the FCC maps that would have made these areas ineligible for the RDOF auction. The FCC rightfully rejected these last-minute claims. But if the telcos had been less greedy and had declared a smaller number of Census blocks, they may well have gotten away with the deception. The motivation of these telcos was obvious – they didn’t want anybody else funded to bring broadband to their monopoly service territories, even though they were not delivering decent broadband.

The motivation to do this today is identical. When an ISP declares 100/20 Mbps speed capability, the area is removed from BEAD grant eligibility. The ISP operating in that area will have squelched a new competitor from entering the market using BEAD grants.

The ISPs aren’t finished with this effort. I know several communities where the cable company recently knocked on the door at City Hall to say they are going to upgrade the cable networks this year. These communities are expecting that the cable companies will try to kill BEAD eligibility by declaring the upgrades in the upcoming BEAD map challenges being done in each state.

The NTIA’s and the FCC’s response to this issue is that it is the responsibility of communities to police this issue and to engage in the upcoming state BEAD mapping challenges. I can barely talk about that position without sputtering in anger. Most counties are not equipped to understand the real speeds that are available from an ISP. From my own informal survey, I don’t think that even 10% of counties are considering a map challenge.

But even communities willing to tackle a map challenge will find an incredibly difficult time. First, many states only have a 30-day long map challenge process, and some of the challenges are already underway, with many more challenges to start very soon. Communities have to somehow convince customers of the suspect ISPs to take a speed test multiple times a day in a specific manner. That is hard to do under any circumstances, but particularly hard to do considering the short time frame and specificity of the challenge process.

Consider a real-life example of the difficulty of doing this. I know a county where a WISP claims 100/20 Mbps speed for over five hundred homes in a corner of the county. The county purchased trailing 12-months of Ookla speed test data, and there was only one speed test for this ISP in that area in the last year. If the State Broadband Office won’t accept that as proof for a valid challenge, the County can’t convince nonexistent customers to take a speed test.

This feels like another example of the NTIA ‘protecting the public’ by requiring a lot of proof for a map challenge. The fact is that the folks living in rural areas know the ISPS that work and don’t work. If a ISP appears with decent speeds in an area with no good broadband, word of mouth spreads quickly and a lot of people try the ISP. If a new ISP gains almost no customers, they are either making bogus claims of speed capabilities or they have prices that nobody can afford. Market success should be one of the criteria for a map challenge, and States should invalidate claims by any ISP who have only a sprinkling of customers in an area from blocking BEAD grants. Unfortunately, the FCC does not gather actual customer data in the same detail as the FCC maps – they only gather the speeds claimed by ISPs and the supposed capability to connect customers within 10 days.

The bottom line of all of this is that map manipulation is going to mean that a lot of areas will be excluded from the BEAD grants. Counties are ill-equipped to do the map challenges, and even motivated counties will have a hard time mounting a successful map challenge.

I expect my blogs in a few years will be full of stories of the neighborhoods that got left behind by BEAD and which still won’t have an ISP option with decent speeds. I’m predicting this will be millions of homes. Unfortunately, those homes will be scattered, and it will not be enough homes to drive another big grant program. I fear these folks will be left behind, served only by the ISP that exaggerated the speeds in the FCC map. In the case of the FCC maps, it seems that cheating pays.

One More BEAD Map Challenge

There is still one more chance for local communities or ISPs to fix the maps that will be used to allocate BEAD grant funding. Under the NTIA rules for the BEAD grant process, every State Broadband Office (SBO) must conduct one more challenge process to the maps. This must be done sometime after an SBO has submitted its planned grant rules to the NTIA and before any BEAD grant can be awarded.

The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the BEAD grant says that a unit of local government, nonprofit organization, or broadband service provider can challenge the maps used by each state that define locations that are eligible for BEAD – meaning that the fastest broadband speed offered currently would be slower than 100/20 Mbps.

Every state will have its own timeline, but it’s likely that mapping challenges will done in the first quarter of next year. SBOs are supposed to file their BEAD plans with the NTIA by the end of this year, and so far, only two states have made that filing.

It’s expected that most states will use the FCC maps to define the grant-eligible areas, although states are free to ask the NTIA to use their own version of the maps. The FCC maps were used to allocate the BEAD dollars to states, but states are free to define grant-eligible areas for purposes of awarding grants.

I know from working around the country that there are still plenty of places that should be grant-eligible, but that are still misclassified on the FCC maps. Most States challenged the FCC maps earlier this year, but many states did not have the staff or the facts needed to challenge the maps at the detailed level needed to correct the maps. The FCC map challenge process is complicated, and a lot of valid map challenges were not accepted due to not meeting the FCC’s challenge format.

Any map challenge is going to be most effective if a challenger has some sort of data to support the challenge. Many ISPs are leery of using speed tests as a basis for a map challenge. There is some basis for this since many speed tests are slow due to reasons outside of the control of the ISP, such as a poor WiFi router inside a home.

But I believe that speed tests are a great tool in some circumstances. To be effective, there needs to be a large enough sample of speed tests taken in any geographic area. With enough speed tests, false claims on the FCC map become fairly obvious. For example, if an ISP is claiming in the FCC maps that its technology is delivering speeds greater than 100/20 Mbps, but there are no speed tests even close to that speed, it’s almost certain that the ISP is exaggerating its speed in the FCC reporting.

Challenging a map can get tricky. There are technologies like DSL or FWA wireless where speeds are slower as the distance between a customer and a hub increases. A telco that claims 100 Mbps DSL might be telling the truth for customers close to the DSLAM core – but customers even a relatively short distance further away won’t be able to achieve that speed. I often see telcos and cellular ISPs claiming a uniform speed across a large footprint when that is not possible with the technologies.

As anybody who digs deeply into the FCC maps knows, there are ISPs that just overstate the speed capabilities. They may not be breaking any FCC rules by doing so since ISPs are free to report marketing speeds to the FCC instead of actual speeds. But market speed overstatements can make a neighborhood ineligible for BEAD funding – which would be a shame since there might not be another chance for such places to get broadband funding in the foreseeable future.

It’s likely that there will be a short time window for filing challenges, so anybody interested in doing so should be prepared early and should keep a close eye on the State Broadband Office website to note important events.

The Individual FCC Map Challenge

Hopefully, the word is getting out that individuals can challenge the FCC mapping. We’ve known for years that the FCC mapping is full of errors. ISPs often claim coverage and broadband speeds that are not actually available.

The new FCC map includes the ability to challenge the information that ISPs claim about the coverage at your home or business. The challenge process is built directly into the FCC Broadband map. Anybody can zero in on the map and see the broadband options that ISPs say are available at your location. There are a number of issues you can challenge for a given ISP:

  • The ISP denied a request for service via phone, the company’s website, or another method.
  • The ISP does not offer the technology reported on the FCC broadband map.
  • The ISP is unable or failed to schedule an installation date within 10 business days of your service request.
  • The ISP scheduled an installation but failed to perform the install at the scheduled date and time.
  • The ISP wants a fee greater than the advertised fee for an installation.
  • The ISP does not offer a product with the speed reported on the map. This challenge doesn’t say the ISP doesn’t deliver the speed, just that they didn’t offer the speed listed on the map.
  • No wireless or satellite signal is available at your location.
  • The ISP must construct new network to reach your location. Report if the ISP wants you to pay for construction.

If you challenge any of these items for a given ISP, the FCC will forward on your challenge to the ISP. If that ISP doesn’t respond or dispute the challenge, it must change its reporting for that location on the FCC map. For example, if it doesn’t offer service at your location, it must take you off its FCC map. If the ISP doesn’t offer the speed claimed to the FCC, it would have to lower the claimed speed it offers.

If the ISP disputes your claim, it must provide evidence to you and to the FCC that broadband is available at your location. After a dispute, the ISP has 60 days to reach an agreement with you about its claim. If you and the ISP can’t come to an agreement, the FCC says that it will then resolve the dispute within 90 days. That’s a real puzzler because the FCC doesn’t have the staff to process large volumes of such claims – they are banking on the ISP and the consumer reaching an agreement or the ISP backing down on the claim made on the maps.

The FCC hopes that over time that millions of such challenges will clean up the FCC mapping. The FCC believes that nobody knows more than you about what is available at your home. Rural folks, in particular, have dealt with ISPs that advertise but can’t actually deliver broadband to their home.

The challenge is somewhat weak in that making a challenge will rarely find you a broadband solution. But it’s possible that an ISP will agree to connect you after you make a challenge. The real benefit of the challenge process is to the whole community in that the FCC map gets cleaned up so that we can finally see and count the folks who can’t buy broadband. When it’s proven that your area doesn’t have broadband, the area becomes available for broadband grants.

Unfortunately, the challenge does not include the one thing that folks most want to challenge. You can’t file a formal challenge against an ISP that delivers speed that are far slower than what they sold to you. For example, you can’t file a formal challenge if an ISP sells you ‘up to’ 100 Mbps but delivers 3 Mbps. The FCC will accept this information, but they will treat it as a consumer complaint and not a mapping challenge. Unlike the challenge process, an ISP does not have to respond to a complaint. In fact, by deregulating broadband, the FCC under Ajit Pai weakened the complaint process to the point that it is toothless.

Note that you must provide your name and contact information to make a challenge because the FCC or an ISP might want to contact you. This means you can only challenge for your own location and not your neighbors. The real benefit of the challenge process will come if enough people in neighborhoods make the complaint to get the area maps corrected.