Updated BEAD State Allocations Estimates: How Much Money Will Your State Get?

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is scheduled to release state funding allocations for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program by the end of June 2023. The allocations will be based on the latest version of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Map released in late May 2023. Analyst Mike Conlow crunched the numbers and came up with updated BEAD state allocation estimates based on the new map and following the formula detailed in the rules for the BEAD program. Funding is based, in large part, on the percentage of unserved locations in the state in relation to all unserved locations in the US. Individual states are expected to receive anywhere between $108 million (for Delaware) and $3.5 billion (for Texas), according to Conlow’s estimates. Approximately half of the states saw their funding estimate increase from Conlow’s previous estimates, based on the previous version of the FCC broadband map released in November 2022. That version of the map was based on a location database released to service providers and state agencies in mid-2022, to which service providers added availability data as of June 30, 2022. Conlow notes that change from the first version of the map are driven primarily by two causes. First, some states made successful challenges to the original data that removed some filings from providers and made the locations unserved. Second, fewer locations were claimed as served by the larger providers.