A comparison of Ohio's published broadband grant award data against the FCC's most recent coverage data, examining how many awarded locations already had qualifying broadband service.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is a federal grant program that funds broadband infrastructure in "unserved" and "underserved" locations. Ohio's implementing agency, BroadbandOhio (part of the Ohio Department of Development), finalized a $260.6 million award across 23 projects and 83,992 locations in December 2025.
Under federal program rules, a state may remove already-served locations from an award before execution — a mechanism commonly referred to by its designation, Reason Code 5 (RC5). This is a standard, ordinary part of BEAD program administration, intended to prevent public funds from duplicating existing private investment.
This analysis cross-references Ohio's own published award data against the FCC's Broadband Data Collection (BDC), the same federal dataset the BEAD program's statutory eligibility definition (47 U.S.C. § 1702(a)(2)) is based on, to determine how much overlap exists between the two datasets as of the most recent complete BDC vintage (December 2025, published and downloaded September 2026).
The overlap is not evenly distributed. Some projects show overlap far above the statewide average; others show comparatively little. The full breakdown, by project, is below.
Each row represents one of Ohio's 23 BEAD-funded projects. "Overlap" is the share of that project's awarded locations already reported as served at 100/20 Mbps or faster by a wired provider (cable, copper/DSL, or fiber), per the FCC's December 2025 Broadband Data Collection.
| Awarded provider | Locations | Overlap | Est. duplicate $ |
|---|
The map below shows all 81,247 geolocatable BEAD-awarded locations statewide (of 83,992 total; the remainder had no matching record in any FCC technology file). Point positions are approximate, derived from H3 resolution-8 grid cells (~300m) rather than exact street addresses, since precise coordinates require a separately licensed FCC dataset not used in this analysis.
The FCC's data separately shows that Starlink (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), itself awarded $67.1 million for 40,388 Ohio locations, reports a flat 280/30 Mbps low-latency service to nearly all locations it covers statewide.
Two distinct figures follow from this, and they should not be conflated:
Federal broadband subsidies of this kind are structured to fund new deployment where no reliable option exists, not to subsidize competition against existing service. When an award covers a location that already has qualifying service, the practical effect is a publicly funded competitor entering a market an existing provider — public or private — already serves.
This has a direct, asymmetric effect on providers of different sizes. A subsidized entrant can price below what an unsubsidized incumbent can sustain, since a substantial share of its construction cost is covered by the grant. A large, diversified provider can typically absorb the loss of a single county's customers without materially affecting its business. A small, independent provider — for whom that county may represent a meaningful share of total revenue — is far more exposed: the same lost revenue can affect its ability to invest, maintain service, or continue operating at all.
This dynamic is the specific harm Reason Code 5 exists to prevent. Program guidance gives administering agencies discretion to identify and remove already-served locations before an award is finalized. The data above indicates that discretion, whatever the reason, was not applied consistently across Ohio's 23 funded projects.
fp_locations_update_approved.csv (83,992 locations, 23 projects) and fp_deployment_projects_approved.csv (award amounts, technology, provider). Both are public files linked from broadband.ohio.gov/explore-broadband/bead.