BEAD Project Area Possibilities: Rules Vary a Lot from State to State

Rules for the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband funding program give individual states considerable leeway in how they define project areas—and broadband providers applying for funding should expect to see considerable variation from one state to the next. Depending on the state, providers may even be able to define their own project areas. There is considerable variation among states that are allowing providers to define their own project area. For example, Louisiana established clusters of Hex9s, which the state calls sub project areas (SPAs). Providers can group SPAs together to define the areas they want to serve. States that allow providers to establish their own project areas have an important issue to address – how to address overlapping project areas. In Louisiana, the question would be: What if two providers define project areas that overlap in certain SPAs, but each provider also bid on certain other SPAs? The answer is that in the first round, the highest-scoring provider would win funding for the overlap area and the other provider’s bid would be rejected in its entirety. But the second provider could apply in the next round for the portion of its original bid area that the competitor didn’t win.