Adding U.S. territories to the BEAD allocation formula

I added U.S. territories as recipients of BEAD allocation dollars based on their number of unserved locations in additional to the minimum fixed allocation. (Thanks to the couple folks who helped me understand the various definitions of “state” and “eligible entity” in the IIJA and BEAD NOFO.) The update is in the same spreadsheet I have been using, available here. The upshot is Puerto Rico has 212,70 unserved locations, 18% of their total, and an estimated $874 million allocation, which is significant.

The other territories don’t change the numbers materially because we don’t see them as having unserved locations. This could be due to incomplete data. Because the FCC didn’t release a file of all locations, we can only infer number of unserved locations by state. While I don’t think this is an issue for the official U.S. states, it may be for territories. Since Puerto Rico is much bigger than the other territories, and its data appears to be complete, I believe this allocation formula now captures the bulk of the effect from adding territories.

(I haven’t given territories an allocation based on high-cost locations. The cost model I used doesn’t cover territories so I don’t know how to estimate high-cost locations. High-cost is only 10% of the total BEAD funding, so it is unlikely to move the numbers much.)