FWA Mapping and BEAD Grants

There is one mapping issue that unfortunately messed up the count of eligible passings for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants and that is going to be a real concern. Both T-Mobile and Verizon have activated rural cell sites that can deliver home broadband using licensed spectrum that can be 100/20 Mbps or a little faster. According to the way that the Federal Communications Commission and the BEAD grants determine grant eligibility, these locations are considered as served. There are several reasons why this is going to be a practical problem in the BEAD grant process. First, the areas claimed by the cellular carriers on the FCC's maps are not accurate. Cellular broadband signal strength decreases with the distance between the cell tower and a customer. I’ve also described how the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) carved up the unserved and underserved areas in many counties into a jumbled mess, and fixed wireless access (FWA) coverage makes it that much harder to put together a BEAD area that makes both engineering and financial sense. There is a more subtle issue that is even more troubling. The cellular carriers have no intention of serving everybody within the range of a cell site. There are constraints on the number of people they are willing to serve. This makes it hard to understand why the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) rushed to define this technology as qualifying as serving broadband. The willingness and ability to serve everybody ought to be one of the most prominent factors when declaring a technology to be creating served areas. My final issue with FWA cellular technology is that is expanding rapidly. Soon, it won’t just be Verizon and T-Mobile deploying the technology. UScellular, DISH, and AT&T are likely to start popping up in rural areas. I’ve been scratching my head wondering how State Grant offices and providers are going to deal with the technology if it’s activated during the grant review process.