Mike Conlow

With $37 billion of the $42 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program based on the number of locations unserved by broadband, accurately measuring who is unserved is critical — both for the allocation of funds, but, more importantly, so people without access to real broadband can be connected.

More thoughts on what the Federal Communications Commission's new maps of locations unserved and underserved by broadband mean for new deployment programs. 7.8 million unserved locations, or 6.9% of the total locations, meet expectations almost exactly. It’s 118% higher than the 3.58 million unserved housing units in the Form 477 data. The number of underserved dropped, which is a surprise, but maybe shouldn’t have been. In the Form 477 data there were 7.35 million underserved housing units. That fell to 6.0 million locations in the new maps. That’s a 19% decline. It makes sense.

Overall, there are 112 million Broadband Serviceable Locations (BSLs) in the country (excluding territories). Of those, 7.15% of the BSLs are Unserved, which is 8 million. 5.2% of the BSLs are Underserved, or 5.8 million nationally. The Unserved and Underserved numbers provided are how I expect the calculation to be done for the BEAD program: it excludes LEO satellite service and also excludes service provided over unlicensed fixed wireless. It’s important to remember that the denominator in these calculations is BSLs, not housing units. BSLs include small businesses.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates it will take between $397 billion and $478 billion to reach all underserved locations. It’s worth remembering there are only two numbers at play: the number of locations that don’t have access to 100/20 broadband service, and the average cost to bring fiber-to-the-home service to those locations. I estimated 23.1 million un- and underserved locations. The FCC study estimated 45.5 million, or 32% of all United States housing units. The second part of the equation is the cost to serve the average unserved or underserved location.

One can assess the population that is unserved by broadband, the residential housing units unserved by broadband, or with the new Federal Communication Commission maps, “broadband serviceable locations.” My analyses are based on census block-level housing unit projections for 2019 (based on the 2010 Census), published by the FCC.

In a previous post, I estimated how far the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program broadband funding might go in closing the digital divide. With this updated model, the national story is the same: after you factor in existing funding programs and private capital matches, there is plenty of money in BEAD to reach all of the unserved and reach far into the underserved. Maybe more interesting are the state-level stories.

The Federal Communications Commission released Form 477 data as of June 30, 2021. The top lines of the release are: 3.6 million housing units (as of 2019 projections) unserved by 25/3 broadband, which is 2.55 percent of the 141 million housing units nationally.

Combining “cost to serve” estimates for any un- and under-served location in US with data on the number of un- and underserved we can estimate how far broadband funding might go. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program won't provide any funding where the Federal Communications Commission has committed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund support. And the National Telecommunications and Information Administration hopes to not provide 100% of the costs for new networks—I’m assuming that private capital provides 25% of the remaining necessary funding.

To estimate how much it will cost to close the digital divide in broadband access we need two pieces of information: the cost to serve each location, and how many locations there are.

The Federal Communications Commission has been making admirable progress on its new broadband maps, and recently it opened up its system for internet service providers (ISPs) to input coverage data against the new Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric.