The National Broadband Mapping Coalition monthly call series continued with a call on November 20. Dustin Loup gave a brief welcome and announced the featured speaker for the call would be Thomas Tyler of ConnectLA to talk about their Final Proposal for BEAD funding in the state of Louisiana. In addition, the call included a discussion of recently released updated Broadband Data Collection (BDC) maps.
Following Dustin’s introduction, Thomas opened by saying that his office is moving quickly to complete the preparation of their Final Proposal, which had been released for public comment two days earlier and is due by the end of this year. Bidding was opened to service providers in August on about 140,000 BEAD-eligible locations throughout Louisiana, organized into roughly 1800 sub-project areas (SPAs). Following public comment, their goal is to submit to NTIA by December 12.
Thomas described a two-round bidding process with most locations receiving funding applications from multiple service providers in the first round. Due to overlapping and conflicting bids, only nineteen awards were made in the first round. In round two, with adjusted bids from the first round, awards were made to 127,000 locations, the majority of which are fiber-to-the-home locations with an average cost of passing of about $5000. Following the second round, they were able to reach out and encourage providers to bid on the remaining 12,000 locations. In the end, about 95% of locations are to be served by fiber with the remainder served by alternative technologies.
In response to questions from others on the call, Thomas shared additional information and lessons learned from their experience. For example, all the awards have been made with providers subject to the 25% match requirement, although some have applied for waivers. To establish baseline pricing, they used CostQuest modeling data. Twenty providers received awards, with awardees posted on their website. Finally, awards were made in about 40 of the roughly 100 SPAs qualifying for Critical Resilience Needs (CRN) incentives.
Dustin invited Christine Parker of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to comment on the latest FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC) release. Christine noted difficulties in using BDC data that arise due to changes between release versions. In response to a suggestion form Dustin, Robert Martin of Works Public commented that while some folks are already archiving BDC data using automated tools, it would be great to have a centralized archive. Another issue Christine identified is that ISPs can disappear and reappear from version to version based on whether they provide a data update for a given version.
A recording of the call is available to Coalition members on request (info@marconisociety.org). Dustin reminded everyone that the next National Broadband Mapping Coalition call will take place on Wednesday, December 18, a week earlier than usual due to the holidays.
