Feds: Before We Spend Billions on Broadband Rollout, We Need Better Maps

pcmag.com:

The infrastructure bill passed last year gives the government a serious budget to get every American online, but it also faces a serious problem: The government still doesn’t know exactly which regions lack broadband access.

At a virtual event hosted Thursday by the tech-policy news site Protocol, the Biden appointee tasked with overseeing this broadband buildout spoke optimistically about the work ahead but noted the map gap.

"We have been talking about the digital divide in this country for over 20 years," National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) head Alan Davidson told Protocol reporter Issie Lapowsky. "We finally have the resources to seriously close that divide."

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act budgets $65 billion towards that task–less than the $100 billion President Biden had earlier sought, but still real money. Most of that falls under a program called Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) that will allocate $42.45 billion to states, territories, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

"It's not going to be a one-size-fits-all for every state," Davidson told Lapowsky, noting that the minimum grant of $100 million combined with some states’ more extensive broadband coverage means some will "handily, easily meet their goals."  

The statute prioritizes serving the unserved, meaning people lacking at least 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads, the definition of broadband that the Federal Communications Commission adopted in 2015. Then come the “underserved,” meaning people who don’t get at least 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up; that faster threshold will probably require much more fiber-optic buildout.

But first the feds need to locate the great unwired more precisely, a goal