Notes from BEAD Challenge weekly office hours Aug 8: specific questions – multiple address challenge and polygons

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This week’s BEAD Challenge weekly office hours included a reminder of the challenge process with no demonstration from the portal developers.

I’ll paste screenshots from the demonstration below and general notes and questions that caught my attention. The questions are pretty specific. I’ve done my best to capture the gist of the question, but I don’t always know the idiosyncrasies of the portal.

As I said last week, OBD does a nice job providing this space for questions and for understanding the details of the questions.

  • Challenge Period ends on Aug 21
  • You don’t need to do a speed test if you already show up as unserved

Q: How can you track what’s being challenged on the map? (From a county rep.)
There isn’t a global way to see it. You could go to the location. As a registered user of the portal, you should be able to see all open challenges/rebuttals that are not against an ISP.
Sounds like you can see challenges at the location level.
We can tell you how many locations by county if you are registered user.

Q: List of locations that are provided under location IDs – that are eligible for BEAD funding. So any with a Y is not eligible?
Yes, because it indicates an enforceable
As we draw polygons of locations to challenge. Do we do multiple do avoid eligible locations? Or can we do a larger polygon to include all addresses.
You can draw a part of a large polygon – but that’s more work for the OBD. It’s easier for them if you draw individual polygons to only capture eligible locations.
OK but that might be 20 hours of work for us. Would we need to do to separate challenges for each polygon?
Yes. Maybe there’s a way to communicate with OBD about this sort of situation.
We could include a list of addresses that we are challenging along with the polygon.

Q: How long from provider challenge until it shows up in the system? I did one yesterday and it doesn’t show up.
Probably 3-4 days. And if you had done something wrong it likely would not have submitted.

Q: If there are a flurry of 11th hour challenges and it takes the State a longer while to get back to folks – are there provisions to extend the rebuttal to 30 days?
Yes – you will get the 30 days to rebut.

Q: Say we have a customer who takes a speed test but they have selected a lower tier service than those available.
The speed test taker needs to indicate the service they have selected. So, if they choose a lower tier service (10/1), they won’t be able to challenge.
Speed test takes are asked a series of questions about selected speed tiers, wifi setup, no gamers sharing connection during test.

 

From the Chat:

Sign up for the OBD emails: mn.gov/deed/programs-services/broadband/contact/

 

Keep an eye on the OBD webpage for the latest info + resources on BEAD: mn.gov/deed/programs-services/broadband/bead/

 

Contact OBD: deed.broadband@state.mn.us  or (651) 259-7610

The FAQ is on the webpage under “Additional Resources”

Registration links for upcoming sessions: 

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