Yes, there really is enough money to reach most of the Unserved and Underserved

Recently, a wireless company published a study about the cost to reach all the Unserved and Underserved. They estimated we need $307 billion to reach everyone. Generally, they make a case that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program will run out of money, so the federal government should settle for wireless technology. However, we have almost enough money to reach all the Unserved and Underserved, except for states that are particularly high-cost. Estimating how far the money will go does not require advanced math. We need an average cost to reach a location and the total number of locations. There are 12.8 million Unserved and Underserved locations nationally. Instead of using the FCC data, the wireless study estimates this number from Census data, then adds 10% assuming growth from challenges to arrive at 16 million locations. There’s an important practical takeaway from all this: a public cost curve for every state is critical. If states don’t have the cost curve data and the ability to run a grant program that optimizes on it, BEAD will run out of funding for sure, and it doesn’t matter whose numbers we use for an estimation now.