Second look: New FCC Maps

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. Under the previous maps, a Census block was “served”, “underserved” or “unserved”. It makes sense that previously-partially-served and underserved blocks both gave up locations to the unserved category. In total, the new maps show 13.8 million unserved and underserved locations. While the new maps met expectations for unserved locations, there are significantly fewer locations to reach than we thought when we include underserved. And $42.25 billion is enough money to reach all the unserved, and make significant progress on the underserved, though high cost states will have a much tougher time.