  In 2021, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program
allocated $42.45 billion to enhance high-speed internet access across the
United States. As part of this funding initiative, The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) developed a national coverage map to guide the allocation of
BEAD funds. This map was the key determinant to direct BEAD investments to
areas in need of broadband infrastructure improvements. The FCC encouraged
public participation in refining this coverage map through the submission of
"challenges" to either locations on the map or the status of broadband at any
location on the map. These challenges allowed citizens and organizations to
report discrepancies between the map's data and actual broadband availability,
ensuring a more equitable distribution of funds. In this paper, we present a
study analyzing the nature and distribution of these challenges across
different access technologies and geographic areas. Among several other
insights, we observe, for example, that the majority of challenges (about 58%)
were submitted against terrestrial fixed wireless technologies as well as that
the state of Nebraska had the strongest engagement in the challenge process
with more than 75% of its broadband-serviceable locations having submitted at
least one challenge.
