The success of investments in broadband equity depends on pinpointing where gaps exist. New maps from Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity aim to bring them into better focus.

This month, as required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is expected to issue program rules for $42.5 billion in funds to support broadband deployment. This is the largest single investment the federal government has made in broadband.

Through the Broadband Equity, Access and Development (BEAD) Program, each state will receive a minimum of $100 million. Additional funds will be provided based on the number of locations that are “unserved” (do not have access to reliable service of at least 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload) or “underserved” (do not have reliable 100/20 Mbps service).

It has been an open secret for some time that mapping who does and who doesn’t have service at these levels is far from an exact science. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) counts an entire census block as “covered” if one household in it has broadband service.

In 2018, Congress provided funding to the NTIA to create a National Broadband Availability Map (NBAM) and to work with FCC as well as state and local governments, nonprofits, network owners and operators and other stakeholders to achieve this goal.

So far, 40 states and territories have provided data to NTIA. But much of this data is from resident surveys or requests for service collected via web portals, says William Rinehart, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity. It might be more than was previously known, but it’s still missing important details; moreover, the data is not available to researchers.

One state took a more comprehensive approach to tracking coverage and shared its data set. Rinehart used this work as the basis for a national projection.

Household by Household

In June 2021, the state of Georgia published a broadband availability map created by overlapping the location of every home and business in the state with broadband service available to those locations. The work of creating the map was overseen by the Institute of Government at the University of Georgia.

The map, the first of its kind, revealed coverage gaps that were not apparent in FCC data. For example, in Fulton County, designated 100 percent covered by the FCC, the enhanced map included 16,000 households without broadband.

Rinehart took a deep dive into the Georgia data set, analyzing coverage rates and their relationships to a variety of other demographic data points it contained, including such things as education, median income, housing units and FCC metrics. He spent months developing a mathematical model that he could use to estimate coverage across the country.

The projections that resulted suggested that actual coverage could be in the range of about 90 to 93 percent of U.S. homes, significantly lower than the 97.5 percent estimated by the FCC. (The lower estimate came from a model that controlled for age, income, education as well as geographic size of a place and the number of homes.)

“I’m trying to add more data into these estimates,” says Rinehart. “We don’t have a good sense of where the gaps in broadband actually exist — it seems that money was allocated before there was understanding of the actual need.”

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