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There is one mapping issue that unfortunately messed up the NTIA’s count of eligible passings for BEAD, grants and that is going to be a real concern for folks who file BEAD grants. Over the last year, both T-Mobile and Verizon have activated rural cell sites that can deliver home broadband using licensed cellular spectrum that can be 100/20 Mbps or a little faster. According to the way that the NTIA and the BEAD grants determine grant eligibility, these locations are considered as served.
There are several reasons why this is going to be a practical problem in the BEAD grant process. First, the claimed areas claimed by the cellular carriers on the FCC maps are not accurate. Cellular broadband signal strength decreases with the distance between the cell tower and a customer. The easiest way to explain that is with an example. I talked to a farmer in Illinois who has the T-Mobile FWA broadband and is thrilled with it. The T-Mobile tower is on his farm and he’s getting over 200 Mbps download speed. He bragged about the technology to his neighboring farmers. One of his neighbors over a mile away is getting download speeds over 100 Mbps. But another neighbor over two miles away is getting speeds closer to 50 Mbps and doesn’t like the product.
At some future point, the FCC is supposed to require heat maps around each cell site to more accurately show the actual speeds that can be delivered, But for now, T-Mobile and Verizon are typically claiming speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster for a sizable area around each cell site. This speed is true for the folks close to the tower, but at the outer fringe of each claimed circle are customers who are not able to receive 100/20 Mbps broadband. Those areas should be eligible for BEAD grant funding. I have no idea how State Broadband offices are going to deal with this. Any Grant office that decides to stick with the FCC maps will be condemning small pockets of folks to have worse broadband than everybody around them.
This is also another problem to deal with for an ISP seeking BEAD grants. I’ve described in the past how RDOF carved up the unserved and underserved areas in many counties into a jumbled mess, and FWA cellular coverage makes it that much harder to put together a BEAD serving area that makes both engineering and financial sense.
There is a more subtle issue that is even more troubling. The cellular carriers have no intention of serving everybody within the range of a cell site. There are constraints on the number of people they are willing to serve. This is similar to the constraints that Starlink has with serving too many people in a given small geographic area. This makes it hard to understand why NTIA rushed to define this technology as qualifying as served broadband. The willingness and ability to serve everybody ought to be one of the most prominent factors when declaring a technology to be creating served areas.
Even worse, T-Mobile says in the terms of service that it reserves the right to throttle usage on the FWA service. The bread and butter product for cellular companies is people with cell phones, and they are giving those customers priority access to the bandwidth at each tower. Any time cellular traffic demand gets too high, the usage to FWA customers will be restricted. That may not be a problem for low-population cell towers – but customers at any tower that has this restriction are going to be unhappy if broadband slows to a crawl in the evening.
My final issue with FWA cellular technology is that is expanding rapidly. Soon, it won’t just be Verizon and T-Mobile deploying the technology. UScellular, DISH, and AT&T are likely to start popping up in rural areas. I’ve been scratching my head wondering how State Grant offices and ISPs are going to deal with the technology if it’s activated during the grant review process. Cellular companies have every motivation in the world to intervene in grant applications and declare that areas are served and ineligible for grants. If the FWA carriers are allowed to make this claim for new cell sites, I can foresee numerous ISPs walking away from BEAD applications if the serving areas get carved up too badly.
This is a new technology, and, in my opinion, the NTIA rushed to accept these areas as served. The technology is so new that there was almost nobody served with cellular FWA back when the IIJA legislation enabled the BEAD grants. For the reasons I’ve discussed, it makes no sense to give cellular companies little broadband monopolies around their cell sites.
