And even with a federal grant, New Mexico still has a long, costly road to connect everyone to high-speed, reliable Internet. Broadband office acting director Drew Lovelace told the Journal it will take $2.1 billion more.
In June, the federal government awarded New Mexico $675 million to hook up households lacking Internet to good service.
The money came from the federal Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment Program, or BEAD, which provided $42.5 billion to expand high-speed Internet in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and five U.S. territories.
But it'll still be a while before New Mexico actually sees that money. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration needs to approve a few plans first.
One is a proposal New Mexico's broadband office submitted in December. Lovelace said it's unclear when the plan might be approved.
The other plan is focused on the broadband office's challenge process. The proposal addresses a major and consistent issue New Mexico and other states have faced in the rollout of the BEAD program: mapping errors.
Before awarding states BEAD money, the Federal Communications Commission published a map of areas in each state that do and don't have Internet. New Mexico broadband officials found that many areas without good Internet are incorrectly marked on the map as having reliable service.
The mapping mistakes would cause those areas to miss out on the BEAD dollars.
So, New Mexico broadband officials have been working to fix the problem for years now, going back and forth with the FCC to update inaccuracies.
When the NTIA approved New Mexico's challenge proposal in April, it launched the state's challenge process.
The challenge process allows local governments, tribal nations, nonprofits and Internet service providers to provide input to the state on the accuracy of the maps, like pointing out places that still need reliable Internet service.
"This is the last chance to get the maps right," Lovelace said.
The challenge process is open until May 18.
Andrew Wilder, BEAD coordinator for the state's broadband office, said as of Wednesday there had been 56 challenges, which can be either for a single location or multiple locations. He said he anticipates a lot more challenges.
"We really want and encourage participation in this challenge process," he said. "I just want to restate: This is the last chance to get the map right. BEAD is such a huge investment. It is going to behoove us as a state to get that map right so we can make those dollars go as far as they can."
Once the challenge process closes, the state will give Internet service providers another month, starting May 27, to prove challenges wrong in the rebuttal process.
Starting in late June, the state has a month to review the challenge and rebuttal submissions, then make a final decision on whether areas on the map should be updated or not.
NTIA will still need to approve the updated map before New Mexico can start doling out money to Internet service providers.
Wilder said the earliest the state will likely submit a map to NTIA is July.
"Ultimately, on the back end of all of this, we'll have our final map that is going to be the BEAD-eligible locations that need to get funding," Lovelace said.
He said the process to get the federal dollars is more back-and-forth than other grant programs.
"This has felt more administratively burdensome than other programs," he said.
He said New Mexico likely won't see any of the $675 million until 2025.
"I think that we're going to be able to get it done and be able to meet all the programmatics and make sure the money flows into the state," he said.
A FIRST
Lovelace said getting the mapping right is often one of the biggest headaches for other state's broadband directors, based on conversations he's had with them, "because ultimately, this is about who gets service and who doesn't."
He said when the FCC started the process in 2022, service information came from Internet service providers, not local governments or nonprofits. Then NTIA used the FCC maps to try to pinpoint service locations.
"So it really changed how the mapping had to be done, ... you actually had to document where the locations were. And that type of data just was never available before this," Lovelace said.
He said New Mexico plans to maintain its map in perpetuity unless statutory requirements change, and he's hopeful other states will do the same, too.
"There's going to be a lot of valuable data being able to come from it in the future," he said.
A $2.1 BILLION GAP
Lovelace said New Mexico still faces a $2.1 billion gap in connecting everyone to reliable, high-speed Internet.
He said the broadband office got the number from state engineering reports in 2020.
The issue is that middle-mile routes aren't developed, he said, and BEAD is very last-mile focused — a term for the final stretch of cable needed to connect households to broadband. He said a lot of fiber still needs to be built out in New Mexico.
"When you really want to get into the most rural parts of the communities in New Mexico, you just do not have the fiber built along those roadways to get out to those communities," Lovelace said. "And so that's really one of the biggest elements in this."
Another concern for Lovelace is availability of the workforce to get all this broadband work done.
In addition to a need for more broadband deployment workers, he said other agencies like the Department of Transportation are also getting a lot of infrastructure money, creating an overlap of need for the same workers, like heavy machine operators or low-voltage electricians.
"There's just not the capacity in the state," he said.
Lovelace said the New Mexico broadband office has been working with the state's Department of Workforce Solutions to classify new, key roles that are needed. He said the agency is also talking with universities to fill the gap.
Supply chain may also be an issue. Lovelace said a lot of suppliers are anticipating BEAD deployment coming in, but that doesn't address inflation or Internet service provider capacity barriers.
He said the broadband office is also figuring out other ways it can overcome supply chain issues, like buying generic materials that are in stock instead of waiting for brand materials to come in or getting a purple conduit instead of an orange one.
"We've been doing a lot of work," he said.
©2024 the Albuquerque JournaL, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
