Tag Archives: underserved

BEAD – The $42.5 Billion Infrastructure Grants

The new acronym used in the title of this blog refers to the official name of the new $42.5 billion grant program just approved by Congress last Friday – The Broadband  Access, Equity, and Deployment program. Another new acronym is IIJA, for Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – the name of the bill just passed by Congress. Today’s blog will talk about a few high-level rules governing the BEAD grants. I’ll cover other issues of the IIJA in upcoming blogs – things like middle-mile grants and broadband adoption. Since the following provisions are in the legislation they will be in the grant – but there are always tweaks made for final grant rules that will emphasize some points and downplay others.

  • You don’t need to rush to be ready to file for BEAD grants. This funding is going to flow between the NTIA and the States before going to specific grant projects. The Act gives the NTIA 180 days to come up with a plan for inviting states to apply for the funding. After the NTIA approves state plans, the states will have to develop and announce grant programs. I find it highly unlikely that there will be any grant applications due to states until the end of 2022, more likely in early 2023. States will get at least $100 million each, with the rest distributed based upon the number of unserved households in each state. This is a good time to remind those who think that the lousy FCC maps don’t matter that the States with the worst FCC maps are going to lose funding.
  • Cross your fingers that your State is competent because there are several crucial steps that states must adhere to before funding is provided.
  • As expected, grants must adhere to two key definitions of broadband. Unserved are places with broadband speeds under 25/3 Mbps. Underserved are areas with speeds between 25/3 and 100/20 Mbps. Grants must first go to unserved areas before being used for underserved areas. Funding for anchor institutions is only to be considered after serving underserved areas.
  • Grant projects must provide speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps, but faster broadband speeds must be given priority. States must give priority to grants that are deployed in counties with persistent poverty. Projects that are shovel-ready will be given priority. Projects that pledge to pay Davis-Bacon wages will get priority.
  • States will likely not award all of the grants immediately, and the Act asks states to provide a 5-year plan for the use of the funds.
  • Grants don’t have to all go for broadband to unserved and underserved areas. States can use the money for data collection, broadband mapping, and planning. Funding can be used to bring low-cost broadband or WiFi to qualifying multi-family apartments.
  • Unlike the recent NTIA grant program, BEADA doesn’t give priority to any class of grant recipients. The grants can’t exclude cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, public-private partnerships, private companies, public or private utilities, public utility districts, or local governments from eligibility – but none get a preference.
  • There is a challenge process where incumbent ISPs can challenge the validity of a grant area. Interestingly, the NTIA can override States in these challenges.
  • Grant applications must provide at least a 25% matching for the cost of the project. Matching funds can include CAREs funding and ARPA funding – so hang on to those funds for a while! Matching can also come from state grants.
  • Deployed technology must only meet two 9’s reliability, meaning that a network can be out for two days per year and still be considered adequate – that’s a low standard for the industry.
  • Grants must cover every home in a grant coverage area within four years of receiving the grant.
  • Grant recipients must provide at least one low-cost broadband option for eligible households. The NTIA is expressly forbidden to regulate rates in any manner.
  • Interestingly, any fiber built along highways must include access points at regular and short intervals. This money is not for middle-mile fiber.
  • Grant recipients must carry out public awareness programs in grant areas extolling the benefits of better broadband.
  • There is plenty of paperwork. Grant recipients must file semiannual reports tracking the effectiveness of the grant funding.

This grant program dwarfs all previous grant programs combined, so there is going to be a lot of money coming to every State. What is still to be determined is how States will administer these grants – and there will be differences. But the legislation provides enough detail for communities and ISPs to start looking at how to be positioned for these grants.

Time to Stop Talking about Unserved and Underserved

I work with communities all of the time that want to know if they are unserved or underserved by broadband. I’ve started to tell them to toss away those two terms, which are not a good way to think about broadband today.

The first time I remember the use of these two terms was as part of the 2009 grant program created by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009. The language that created those grants included language from Congress that defined the two terms. In that grant program, unserved meant any home or business that has a broadband speed of less than 10/1 Mbps. Underserved was defined as homes having speeds above 10/1 Mbps but slower than 25/3 Mbps.

As far as I can tell, these terms have never been defined outside of broadband grant programs. However, the terms began to be widely used when talking about broadband availability. A decade ago, communities all wanted to know if they were unserved or underserved.

The terms began to show up in other grant programs after 2009. For example, the FCC’s CAF II grant program in 2015 gave money to the largest telephone companies in the country and funded ‘unserved’ locations that had speeds less than 10/1 Mbps.

The same definition was used in the ReConnect grants created by Congress in 2018 and 2019. Those grants made money available to bring better broadband to areas that had to be at least 90% unserved, using the 10/1 Mbps definition.

The biggest FCC grant program of 2020 has scrapped the old definition of these terms. This $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) grant program is being made eligible to Census blocks that are “entirely unserved by voice and with broadband speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps”. That seemingly has redefined unserved to now mean 25/3 Mbps or slower broadband – at least for purposes of this federal grant program.

There are also states that have defined the two terms differently. For example, following is the official definition of broadband in Minnesota that is used when awarding broadband grants in the state:

An unserved area is an area of Minnesota in which households or businesses lack access to wire-line broadband service at speeds that meet the FCC threshold of 25 megabits per second download and 3 megabits per second upload. An underserved area is an area of Minnesota in which households or businesses do receive service at or above the FCC threshold but lack access to wire-line broadband service at speeds 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload.

It must also be noted that there are states that define slower speeds as unserved. I’m aware of a few state broadband programs that still use 4/1 Mbps or 6/1 Mbps as the definition of unserved.

The main reason to scrap these terms is that they convey the idea that 25/3 Mbps broadband ought to be an acceptable target speeds for building new broadband. Urban America has moved far beyond the kinds of broadband speeds that are being discussed as acceptable for rural broadband. Cable companies now have minimum speeds that vary between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. Almost 18% of homes in the US now buy broadband provided over fiber. Cisco says the average achieved broadband speed in 2020 is in the range of 93 Mbps.

The time has come when we all need to refuse to talk about subsidizing broadband infrastructure that is obsolete before it’s constructed. We saw during the recent pandemic that homes need faster upload speeds in order to work or do schoolwork from home. We must refuse to accept new broadband construction that provides a 3 Mbps upload connection when something ten times faster than that would barely be acceptable.

Words have power, and the FCC still frames the national broadband discussions in terms of the ability to provide speeds of 25/3 Mbps. The FCC concentrated on 25/3 Mbps as the primary point of focus in its two recent FCC broadband reports to Congress. By sticking with discussions of 25/3 Mbps, the FCC is able to declare that a lot of the US has acceptable broadband. If the FCC used a more realistic definition of broadband, like the one used in Minnesota, then the many millions of homes that can’t buy 100/20 Mbps broadband would be properly defined as being underserved.

In the last few months, the FCC decided to allow slow technologies into the $16.4 billion RDOF grant program. For example, they’ve opened the door to telcos to bid to provide rural DSL that will supposedly offer 25/3 Mbps speeds. This is after the complete failure in the CAF II program where the big telcos largely failed to bring rural DSL speeds up to a paltry 10/1 Mbps.

It’s time to kill the terms unserved and underserved, and it’s time to stop defining connections of 10/1 Mbps or 25/3 Mbps as broadband. When urban residents can buy broadband with speeds of 100 Mbps or faster, a connection of 25/3 should not be referred to as broadband.