BEAD Grants for Small Pockets of Customers

One of the most interesting aspects of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants is that the funding is intended to make sure that everybody gets broadband. There is one section of the grant rules that talk about how the funding can be used to serve areas as small as a single home:

• "A 'project' may constitute a single unserved or underserved broadband-serviceable location, or a grouping of broadband-serviceable locations in which not less than 80 percent of broadband-serviceable locations served by the project are unserved locations or underserved locations."
• "An 'Unserved Service Project' may be as small as a single unserved broadband-serviceable location."

There are small pockets of folks that have been left out of other broadband expansion projects. I’m curious about how small areas like this one can fit into the complicated BEAD grant rules. I’m sure the two different internet service providers (ISPs) that decided not to build these areas would do so if they got enough funding – which should be available from BEAD. But I can’t picture any ISP going through the massive hassle of plowing through the BEAD application and the myriad of rules to get the money to serve fifteen homes.