Mike Conlow

I’ve long been confused by the term “technological neutrality” in broadband deployment conversations. Advocates would say that if a provider can hit certain performance benchmarks, it doesn’t matter what technology is used. But all these technologies are not created equal. Using provider-reported performance benchmarks alone ignores valuable data on the access technology. For example, there are 210,000 housing units where the best available technology is DSL yet they are still considered served by 100/20 broadband and thus ineligible for any funding under the IIJA.

How quickly has broadband deployment progressed? How fast have Census blocks moved from unserved to underserved (or served)? And is there any movement in the other direction? From served areas to underserved or unserved? For the whole United States, there were 6.76 million unserved housing units in the Dec 2019 Form 477 data. 950,000 of those housing units moved to underserved in the next update for June 2020. 402,000 became served.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will put $42.45 billion into broadband buildout, to be distributed by the states. Less than a year earlier, the FCC’s high-cost Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) committed $9 billion for rural buildout and subsidies in some of the same areas. Here, I explore which RDOF areas are likely to get funded, what that means for the remaining unserved locations, and the amount of funding each state will have for each remaining unserved location.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) gives the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) a specific allocation formula for distributing the $42.45 billion in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Importantly, even the allocation of funds to states has to wait until after the Federal Communications Commission is done with their new maps. After all, the formula is based on the number of unserved locations and we don’t trust the existing data on unserved locations.

The Federal Communications Commission is diligently working on new broadband maps. The stakes are high since all of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act broadband funding requires the new maps to exist before the money can be allocated to states. The new maps will fix a well-known flaw in the current “Form 477” maps, which is Census blocks are either served or not served - there’s no concept of a partially served block. Here, I use a simple technique to make an estimate of what the new maps might look like, using only data currently available.

Pew Research Center released their latest “Mobile Technology and Home Broadband 2021” survey, which is one of the authoritative reports on broadband adoption. What will probably get some attention is the breakdowns of the non-adopters of broadband. The largest group is the 27% who haven’t adopted broadband because the cost of the service or devices is too high.

In March 2020, the House and Senate passed the Broadband DATA Act unanimously and President Donald Trump signed it into law. Lawmakers seem to think the new data will itself fix the homework gap. But we need Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to improve data for all the factors that prevent Americans from using broadband service—including affordability and the speeds you’ll actually get in rural areas. Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai liked to tout that the number of Americans without broadband acces