Serving the Hard-to-Reach Areas

It’s clear in reading the various proposed Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) rules that State Broadband Offices are following the lead of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and putting a lot of emphasis on making sure that everybody gets served with the grant funding. I’m not sure they understand the costly consequences of this emphasis. There are some passings in this country that are largely unservable. Extremely isolated areas or especially rocky terrains can eat up tens of thousands of dollars per passing—and a good portion of a state's BEAD money. The reason this is an issue is that the NTIA rules expect states to fund 100% of unserved locations – 99% coverage will be considered a failure. Interestingly, a few states seems to be skirting this issue by only looking at the hardest-to-serve places after they’ve given grants for everybody else. I have to imagine that’s something that the NTIA will find fault with, but it’s the right approach to take.