BEAD Program: A Framework to Allocate Funding for Broadband Availability

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s $42.45B Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program holds out tremendous opportunity to close the broadband availability gap. To assist States and Territories and ACA Connects Members in seizing that opportunity, ACA Connects engaged Cartesian to develop a framework for how each State and Territory can spend BEAD funds on fixed broadband projects to connect their unserved and underserved locations.

In this new update to the analysis, we use the latest data to estimate the number of unserved and underserved locations in each State and Territory and the amount of BEAD funding that they will receive. Using a proprietary, bottom-up cost model, we then explore fixed broadband deployment scenarios to illustrate how these funds can be used to maximize coverage. With the most recent data from the FCC’s National Broadband Map, the framework will give States and Territories a head start in developing plans to award funds for fixed broadband deployment projects to capable and experienced providers.

Version 3.1 of our framework uses an enhanced methodology that takes advantage of the new NTIA Funding Amounts released on June 26, 2023. Our analysis also now includes a sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of starting BEAD deployment later than the January 2024 baseline assumption.