Cleaning the map so that we can spend broadband funds efficiently

Recently I wrote about how there are too many locations in the National Broadband Map when you compare it with the recently-released Census count of housing units. In rural areas, there are 30.1 million housing and business units according the National Broadband Map, and 24.6 million housing units according to the Census. This isn’t just academic. Some (in fact many) of those extra locations are Unserved or Underserved. Before the allocation, all the attention was on adding missing locations to the map. Now that we’re through the allocation, when you look ahead the problem is having too many [not real] Unserved locations, not too few. If there’s an Unserved location that isn’t real, we risk making a grant that won’t actually connect anyone — the broadband bridge to nowhere. Another common situation is Unserved locations in dense Served areas, where, ideally, we could serve the location without any grant program at all. In any of these cases, I think it would be ideal to have some level of community involvement. Removing the extraneous locations is important to overall efficiency. But we should not have much tolerance for accidentally removing a real family who really needs broadband. So giving communities (counties, towns, or the public) the ability to weigh in feels important.