The Infrastructure Essentials BEAD Toolkit is an essential planning tool for ISPs and state broadband offices anticipating Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
Newsflash! The Toolkit now includes some Fabric-based data from the FCC (released 11-18-2022).
In a single national Toolkit, it enables users to quickly identify eligible service areas that would be considered qualifying/served, underserved, or unserved based the latest performance definitions.
The new BEAD performance requirements expose large portions of the United States as failing to meet minimum broadband performance requirements, enabling states and territories to fund additional infrastructure deployment with money from the IIJA.
This Toolkit juxtaposes the many layers of decision-making information that are available today. The rich juxtaposition of many data sets is extremely powerful.
The data sets include:
- Housing units (a.k.a. homes passed) at a block level.
- FCC block-level data at three BEAD performance thresholds:
- Qualifying Broadband Service (100 Mbps / 20 Mbps)
- Underserved (equal or greater than 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps but less than 100 Mbps /20 Mbps)
- Unserved (less than 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps)
- Federal Programs: CAF II, RDOF, and USDA (ReConnect and others, current and pending), seen through the lens of BEAD NOFO “enforceable commitments”.
- USDA Metrics (Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), and various measures of rurality).
- Measured network performance data (uplink and downlink speeds), service pricing, and other data provided by multiple third parties (not-for-profit and commercial) and in some cases aggregated by the NTIA.
- Community Anchor Institutions (schools (k-12), libraries, medical / healthcare, public safety, universities / colleges / post-secondary, other / government, other / NGO)
- 911 / PSAP boundaries
- Opportunity Zones
- A vast collection of geographic boundaries, high resolution numerical data (visualized with a click of the mouse), streaming maps, and other tools.
Demographic and economic data is presented as visual and numerical heat maps:
- Population density
- Household density
- Housing unit density
- Income per capita
- Mean household income
- Median household income
- Poverty Line (reflecting HH size)
- Household Size
- SNAP Participation Rate
Take a few minutes to read the Introduction (a conceptual overview) and Getting Started Guide to understand the breadth of what the Toolkit can do.
This Infrastructure Essentials BEAD Toolkit is complemented by an optional Technology and Competition Module that shows the block-level deployment of key technologies (fiber, DOCSIS, DSL, and Fixed Wireless Access). It also shows the footprint at a tract level of major national competitors and includes an exhaustive spreadsheet database of all competitors sorted by name, location, and technology. Finally, it shows competitive intensity (number of competing entities) on a tract-by-tract basis.
This product includes the relevant geographies in all 50 States plus the District of Columbia plus Puerto Rico.
This product is delivered via a digital download.
