Accurate Broadband Coverage Data Still an Issue for BEAD, Experts Say

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25, 2025 – Flawed broadband maps are still a major issue for the Commerce Department’s $42.45 billion broadband expansion program, experts said Wednesday.

The coverage maps that determined eligibility for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program were based on a database of every broadband serviceable location in the country, called the fabric, maintained by CostQuest. That was overlaid with coverage information reported by providers to the Federal Communications Commission, and states last year ran their own challenge processes, giving ISPs, local governments, and nonprofits the chance to contest that advertised coverage for the purposes of BEAD eligibility. 

State broadband offices had to update their maps again in June after the Trump administration instituted new rules for the program, checking again for new builds, changes to FCC data, and coverage from wireless ISPs on unlicensed spectrum.

“I was working with a company in Kentucky, and they had a miserable time with the fabric. In their part of the world, they believe the fabric has missed 30 percent of the locations,” said Doug Dawson, head of CCG Consulting. “He fought with his broadband office to get a lot more locations recognized for BEAD, but it’s too late. It’s in the fabric they were using and they would not take all the new locations.”

He said it wasn’t a problem in every state, though. He said another client in Illinois had 6,000 passings in its footprint and found just 30 fabric errors, including some sheds that didn’t end up needing broadband.

“That’s really not bad,” he said. “You can’t blame anybody for picking up a large building that turns out not to be a house.”

But by and large, because rural counties tend to have poor data and very little staff capacity to flag issues with BEAD maps, Dawson estimated there were a substantial number of locations not accounted as part of the program.

Dawson and others spoke on a Broadband Breakfast webinar Wednesday. He noted states had varying levels of experience and expertise in mapping infrastructure and administering grants, with some broadband offices having existed for years before BEAD and some being stood up from scratch after the Infrastructure Law was passed.

Many homes and businesses will be passed over, says panelist

Tom Reid, head of Reid Consulting Group, agreed a lot of homes and businesses would be passed over, either because of exaggerated coverage reports to the FCC or because of low-earth orbit satellite awards in areas where tree cover would degrade signal strength.

He said the fabric was a big improvement, but challenging the FCC data that underlies the BEAD eligibility maps has proven difficult, both for private entities and state broadband offices.

“A lot of states challenged the FCC maps based on the veracity of the ISPs’ claims, and they got shut down,” he said. “Obviously some ISPs are doing a great job of reporting availability, they might have a few errors around the edges. But others are just flagrantly overreporting coverage.”

States are spending much less than they were allocated in 2023 under BEAD, partly because the Trump administration has focused on cutting costs and awarding fewer bids to fiber providers, but also because the count of eligible locations has fallen quickly. A New York Law School study found the number fell 65 percent between December 2022 and June 2025, when the Commerce Department changed the program’s rules.

That can in part be attributed to broadband funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, passed in 2021 like the Infrastructure Law that stood up BEAD. 

ARPA provided the $10 billion Capital Projects Fund for broadband and the much larger State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, about $8 billion of which has been budgeted for broadband according to a Treasury Department database. The idea was to get that money out the door quicker – many projects are done, and states have to spend the money by the end of next year – and use BEAD to reach the remaining homes and businesses in a more systematic way.

“ARPA funds have been used to fill in a lot of holes, and there’s just been an organic deployment of infrastructure for other reasons. I think when the original allocations were made for BEAD, that wasn’t really factored in,” said Randy Luening, founder of Broadbandtoolkit.com. “We may in the rearview mirror discover that ARPA was as impactful, maybe more impactful, than BEAD in meeting a lot of these needs.”

Bryan Darr, vice president of government affairs at Ookla, noted South Carolina as an example. The state was allocated $551 million in BEAD money, but was able to build out to more than 250,000 homes and businesses with ARPA projects and is planning to spend just $41 million on BEAD.

The panelists agreed monitoring projects after funding is finalized will be important.

“ISPs can take speed tests when they hook up a new broadband serviceable location,” Darr said. “There’s no reason not to ask them to.”

Reid and Darr plugged Ookla’s crowdsourced speed test data as a means of monitoring projects as they progress. Reid said he worried there would be defaults from BEAD winners down the road.

“There have been a number of awards, in states we work with, to companies that have no presence in the state,” he said. The new rules “took a lot of authority away from the broadband offices to make judgement calls about the parvoiders that they think will actually deliver.”