Cost Models and BEAD Grants

Arizona and Missouri are going to use a cost model as part of their Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grant review process. Consultants have built complex models that are supposed to predict the cost of building broadband anywhere in the country. The models have to be loaded with specific inputs for any given location, and the models are then supposed to calculate what it will cost to build a broadband network. These two states are using the cost models in the worst possible way because they are using the costs suggested by the cost models to help pick grant winners. That means they are accepting the results from the cost models as a real metric and will reject grant proposals that are above or not within a certain range of the cost model estimate.