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 as well as the actual funding allocations by state, announced by the NTIA in June 2023. 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 4.0 of our framework assumes states will begin awarding projects in mid-2024 rather than in January 2024, and we estimate the number of eligible locations by state at that time. Our analysis also includes comparisons to prior versions of the study, assessing how the number of eligible locations have changed between versions, and how BEAD broadband deployment scenarios have evolved.