$42.5 billion won’t be enough to close the US broadband gap

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the first version of its new broadband map, marking a major step toward the distribution of $42.5 billion in funding for network expansions across the country. The maps are set to be used by the government to calculate which states will get the most money from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, with more funding going to those areas with the most unserved locations. But while $42.5 billion seems like a boatload of cash (and, objectively, it is), I’m not convinced it’ll be enough to close the country’s broadband gap. Back in April of 2022, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) chief Alan Davidson set an ambitious target for the BEAD program: ensure 100% of the population has access to broadband offering speeds of 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream. But officials will have their hands full. The FCC map shows 11.2% of locations in the country lack access to wired or licensed fixed wireless access service offering speeds that meet the aforementioned 100/20 Mbps benchmark. That might not seem like much of a gap to bridge, but it’s likely that many of the locations that are unserved remain so because they’re hard to serve – either physically or financially. For context, many of the large operators in the US which have undertaken massive fiber expansions have cited costs per passing ranging from $500 to $1,400. One broadband project in Alaska funded by the US Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect program came with a $203,700 cost per passing. Others in Texas and Michigan had price tags of $77,000 and $63,000 per passing, respectively. Simple math shows $42.5 billion divided by $12,000 means the NTIA has money to reach 3.5 million locations. At $200,000 per passing, the number of locations it can cover falls all the way to 212,500. While this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since more than one person can live at a single location, it provides some sense of the scale of the problem.