Arkansas, which was awarded $1.024 billion in the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, will open accept Main Round applications from January 7 to January 21.
The Arkansas State Broadband Office is administering the process. Arkansas BEAD applications must be submitted to the ARC Connection application portal window.
Eligible costs include construction and improvement and/or acquisition of facilities and telecom equipment, leases, Wi-Fi deployment, network software, engineering activities, personnel, cyber security, and workforce deployments.
The primary criteria are based on a maximum of 100 points:
- Forty points are based on “how high or low applicant’s grant request is relative to the reference subsidy for the” census block groups (CBGs)
- Affordability: Up to 25 points
- Fair labor practices: Up to 10 points
- Speed of deployments: Up to 3 points
- Speed, latency, and other technical issues: Up to 2 points
Additional criteria for the Arkansas BEAD applications are:
- Workforce support: Up to 5 points
- Scale of geographic coverage: Up to 5 points
- Inclusion of zero-bid CBGs: Up to 5 points
- Local coordination: Up to 2.5 points
- Weather resiliency: Up to 2.5 points
Eligible applicants are cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, public-private partnerships, private companies, public and private utilities, public utility districts and local governments.
Last month, Arkansas broadband director Glen Howie told Telecompetitor that the state’s broadband funding program allows providers to use census CBGs to align their project footprints while simultaneously enabling them to account for their financial modeling.
Howie said that the total allotted to the state was a bit less than anticipated but that Arkansas was one of 19 states to get more than $1 billion in funding.
Additional information about Arkansas broadband, including links to state funding resources, BEAD application information, state-specific Telecompetitor coverage and more, can be found on Telecompetitor’s Broadband Nation webpage for the state.
