Iowa's high cost locations might not count in the high-cost allocation of funding

How the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will allocate the 10% of the BEAD funding ($4.25 billion) set aside for high-cost locations has to be an estimate because the NTIA hasn’t shared guidance on how it plans to do that calculation. On a closer reading of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), I want to offer a possible — even likely — scenario where certain states get almost no funding in the high-cost allocation because their Unserved locations are dispersed and not concentrated. Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and others — states with a high percentage of high-cost locations — may actually have a high-cost allocation of nearly $0. What’s happening is that states have different concentrations of Unserved locations. In some states, like Louisiana, 55% of the Unserved locations are in 80%+ Unserved block groups. But in other states, like Iowa, they have almost zero locations in 80%+ locations. Unfortunately, some high-cost states, already at a disadvantage because of much higher than average costs to build broadband, are likely not getting access to this slice of the funding.