BEAD Eligible Locations Drop 14 Percent in New Benefit of the Bargain Lists

As detailed in updated guidance issued by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in June, states have been racing to update their maps of eligible unserved and underserved locations ahead of the mandatory “Benefit of the Bargain” round for awarding Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grants. This has required states to refine their maps to reflect:

• Updates to Federal Communications Commission data, which include newly served locations, corrections to data, etc.;
• Additional enforceable commitments from other funding programs;
• Rural Digital Opportunity Fund defaults; and
• The addition of approved unlicensed fixed wireless service.

To analyze how profound these changes might be, we collected eligible location lists for all 50 states, and aggregated data nationwide. This aggregation includes all broadband servicable locations indicated as eligible for BEAD funding as of each state’s BOTB list and excludes non-BSL Community Anchor Institutions. The total number of eligible unserved and underserved locations has decreased by about 7.7 million since December 2022 when BEAD funding was allocated, a decrease of 65 percent.