A cross-reference of the state's own $260.6 million broadband award list against the FCC's own coverage data shows tens of millions of dollars funding networks that were never unserved to begin with. This is the data. It has already been filed as a formal federal complaint.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is a federal grant program built on one premise: public money goes where private companies haven't already built. 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 — money the state certified was going to places with no other option.
Federal rules already anticipate that some of that certification will be wrong. States are required to remove already-served locations from an award before it's ever executed — a mechanism known as Reason Code 5 (RC5). It exists for exactly this reason: to stop taxpayer money from paying twice for the same wire.
This analysis cross-references Ohio's own award list against the FCC's Broadband Data Collection — the same federal dataset the program's own statutory eligibility definition (47 U.S.C. § 1702(a)(2)) is built on — using data collected within four weeks of the state's own award finalization. There is no plausible argument that the map "changed" after the fact. The overlap documented below existed the moment the checks were being written.
A further, conditional figure: including Unlicensed Fixed Wireless pushes the total to 26.5% ($65.4M) — shown here as context, since NTIA's 2025 restructuring requires a provider-specific verification step before that category can be formally excluded, not raw speed data alone. Even without it, the confirmed number stands: nearly a quarter of this award should never have been written.
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 — every number sourced, every provider named.
Each row represents one of Ohio's 23 BEAD-funded projects. "Overlap" is the share of that project's awarded locations already covered by wired service or Licensed-by-Rule Fixed Wireless combined — both technologies NTIA treats identically for "already served" determinations, per the FCC's December 2025 Broadband Data Collection. The wired-only figure is shown alongside for reference.
| 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), viewed five ways. Wired and Licensed-by-Rule Fixed Wireless are both confirmed technologies under NTIA's own guidance — no extra verification needed. Unlicensed Fixed Wireless is shown separately as conditional context. 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 exist to fund deployment where no reliable option exists — not to bankroll a government-subsidized competitor against a company that already built the network with its own capital, on its own risk, years before any grant was on the table. When an award covers a location that already has qualifying service, that is exactly what happens.
The damage is not evenly distributed. A subsidized entrant can undercut on price because a large share of its construction cost is already covered by the grant — a cost structure no unsubsidized competitor can match. A large, diversified carrier can absorb the loss of a county's worth of customers without blinking. A small, independent provider cannot. For a company where that county is a meaningful share of total revenue, the same loss can mean deferred maintenance, layoffs, or the end of the business — the exact outcome the program's own safeguards were written to prevent.
And it doesn't stop at the companies directly overbuilt. Every private ISP watching this pattern learns the same lesson: build into a marginal, higher-cost area, and a government-subsidized competitor can show up later and undercut you with your own tax dollars. That lesson doesn't just punish the providers already hit — it teaches every other provider not to take the risk next time. That is the opposite of what this program was funded to do.
Reason Code 5 exists precisely to prevent this. The data above indicates that discretion, whatever the reason, was not applied consistently across Ohio's 23 funded projects.
This wasn't one letter that slipped through the cracks. Multiple providers — independently of each other, with no coordination between them — raised the same overlap problem with BroadbandOhio well over a year before this report, in some cases pushing up on two years. Large ones and small ones. Ones with the resources to fight it, and ones without. All of them hit the same wall.
This report does not name those providers. The pattern matters more than any single name attached to it, and several of the providers involved have their own reasons for not wanting to be dragged into a public dispute with the agency that controls their broadband funding future. Anyone with a legitimate reason to verify the underlying claims — a journalist, an investigator, a legislative staffer — can request the supporting detail directly. It exists, it's documented, and it isn't dependent on taking this report's word for it.
And it wasn't a bare assertion. Providers submitted photographs of physical plant already in the ground, customer accounts already connected and billed, invoices proving active paying service — and, of course, the FCC's own National Broadband Map data, the same federal dataset BEAD's own eligibility standard is legally defined by. The state's answer, across the board, regardless of what was submitted: insufficient evidence.
Read that again in light of what the state was actually rejecting. BroadbandOhio took the position that the National Broadband Map itself — the FCC's own map, the one Congress wrote into the statute — was not sufficient proof that a location was served. If the federal government's own coverage map doesn't count as evidence, it is fair to ask what would have.
The state also declined to wait for smaller providers to complete their next scheduled Broadband Data Collection filing — the routine, periodic update that would have independently corroborated exactly what those providers were already saying in writing. And when a curing window was finally offered, it was narrow enough to be barely usable in practice: a few business days, spanning a weekend, with no meaningful advance notice to anyone not already tracking BEAD closely. Most providers only knew the window existed because they happened to be following the program. Smaller providers, without a government-affairs staff or the bandwidth to monitor a state agency's procedural calendar, simply didn't have the manpower to react in time to a process that gave them almost no time to react to.
Some providers didn't file at all — not because they had no case, but because they didn't know there was a window to file in. Providers who had dutifully filed their own BDC reports reasonably assumed that doing so was enough to keep their territory off someone else's award. It wasn't. Ohio's award list was built on data that, by the time the state actually used it, was already out of date — in some cases by roughly two years.
The overlap documented in this report isn't a data artifact that appeared out of nowhere. It was on the record, raised directly, by more than one provider, using evidence that should have settled the question — months and in some cases nearly two years before this award was ever signed. Whether any of it reached the people who could have acted on it, or was simply set aside every time, is precisely the kind of question a public records request may answer in the near future.
This data has already been filed as a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General, alleging misuse of federal program funds under 47 U.S.C. § 1702(a)(2) and 2 CFR § 200.403. The complaint names the responsible state official directly and requests an audit of the statewide pattern documented here — not just a single case.
This is not a one-off grievance. It's a documented pattern, raised in advance, ignored, and now formally escalated.
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.This page can show you the data. It can't make anyone act on it. That takes actual constituents contacting their actual legislators. Below is a template letter built from the findings in this report — nothing here is submitted through this site, and nothing you type is collected, stored, or sent anywhere by this page.
HOW THIS WORKS — 5 STEPS
Don't know your district? Use the state's own lookup tools: House district map · Senate district map.
BroadbandOhio's official public contact address is broadbandohio@development.ohio.gov. The button below opens your own email client with the same letter pre-filled, addressed there instead of to a legislator.
Email BroadbandOhio DirectlyKEY CONTACTS FOR OHIO'S BEAD PROGRAM (source: NTIA's official state broadband contact directory)
Everything in this report — every number, every map point — comes from the package below: the full statewide location dataset, the per-project overlap summary, and all eight map layers (KMZ, viewable in Google Earth or any standard GIS tool). Nothing is held back for this to be independently checked.
All of it is publicly available data. No licensed or proprietary dataset was used — including the FCC's CostQuest Location Fabric, a separately licensed, paid dataset that provides exact parcel-level coordinates. Map coordinates here instead use the FCC's own free H3 grid geography, which is why points are shown as approximate positions rather than exact street addresses. Every source file is named and dated in the Methodology section above.
Download the full data package (.zip)
Includes: statewide_award_data.csv, provider_overlap_summary.csv, and all 8 KMZ map layers, with a README describing each file.