Cost of 100% Fiber in Closing the US Digital Divide will Exceed Funds Available by 5X

Understanding clearly the costs of fiber and other technologies is critical for policymakers, to ensure that policy objectives can be met with available funds. Unfortunately, gaining that understanding is

challenging, given wide variations in fiber deployment methods, local circumstances, and hence real-world costs. The Tarana team has recently worked to solve this problem by tapping detailed public-domain data from 132 divide projects funded by state-level broadband offices since early 2019, in a set of 5 states (Alabama, California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Virginia) chosen specifically to represent fully the wide range of fiber deployment conditions and challenges across the US. The deployments examined were designed to serve a total of 52.7k homes at an aggregate cost of $733.5 million (on average a taxpayer-shocking $13.9k per household served). We used this data to model the likely cost of fulfilling the intent of the broadband element of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, with its stated goal of reaching 100% of America’s households with fast, affordable internet service. Extrapolation from the projects sample indicates that a fiber-only approach would cost over $200 billion to serve the 16 million families currently identified as un- or underserved by the Federal Communications Commission. Obviously this far exceeds the $42.45 billion available in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD). This finding clearly indicates the need for additional technology approaches to the problem — and naturally Tarana recommends our unique next-generation fixed wireless platform (ngFWA).