Remember the tests in school where you got credit for everything right and no points off for errors? Looks like BEAD mapping is a little similar. Doug Dawson goes into the detail…

It’s been clear to anybody who has looked closely at the FCC mapping fabric in rural areas that there are a lot of errors. The FCC map fabric is supposed to identify every place that is a likely candidate to buy broadband. You can find almost any imaginable issue with the map fabric.

• There are plenty of places where CostQuest has placed a grant-eligible location in the middle of a field, far from any home or business. Those are clearly not supposed to be there.
• But there are plenty of locations where there are rural homes that are not identified as eligible in the fabric.
• The most interesting category are locations that are misplaced, but not really an error. You might find a farm where the barn is considered as the eligible location but not the house. We’ve found places where the identified location is where the farm lane meets the highway instead of at the farmhouse.

The NTIA is asking ISPs to eliminate locations where the maps are clearly incorrect but not letting ISPs add back locations that should be in the fabric. This feels like a way to reduce the amount of grants being awarded instead of trying to get it right.

I’ve had a few ISP clients look at a rural area in detail. Several of them have told me that for every mapping fabric location that doesn’t exist, there is a missing location that should be in the fabric. They’ve concluded that the overall count of BEAD-eligible locations is generally not bad as long as you don’t worry about the errors in both directions.