Tempest in a specially constructed teapot

USAC has sent a letter to Commissioner O'Rielly in response to his letter with questions about consortium's overbuilding existing fiber.

First, the most important question: did USAC capitalize the "R" in "E-Rate"?  No!  Philistines!  They even have the gall to shrink the big R when quoting from the Commissioner's letter (he used the big R consistently in his request, perhaps to avoid being labeled O'rielly).  USAC didn't even acknowledge that they were altering the Commissioner's letter with something like "E-[r]ate" or "E-Rate [sic]."

On the main question, USAC's response is a big nothingburger: USAC doesn't know which special construction projects are overbuilding existing networks because carriers don't share the routes of their fiber deployments with the public.  Perhaps the Commissioner will explain exactly what he means by "overbuild" and make a new request.  At one point, he hinted that "overbuild" might mean "installing new fiber in a county where some fiber is already installed." Even so, I can't find any way to find out whether fiber optic cable is hung on poles in a particular area.  USAC mentioned the National Broadband Map, but that's only useful for determining consumer access to Internet access at speeds of at least 25 Mbps (the FCC's benchmark for "broadband").  I can't find any tool that determines if there is any fiber installed in a geographic area.  I guess it's safe to assume that if an ISP is offering 25 Mbps to consumers, it's probably moving that traffic to fiber somewhere nearby.

And now, a little analysis that no one cares about.  The numbers don't add up for me. For example, in FY 2017, USAC says 19 applicants requested special construction as consortia.  Of those, 18 got a funding commitment, 2 were denied for cost-effectiveness, and 2 are still pending.  That's 19 applicants and 22 results.  That must mean that some poor applicants are both Committed and Denied and/or Pending. And if you look at the dollars, there is $74 million requested, $34 million Committed, $2 million Denied-for-cost-effectiveness, and $3 million Pending.  That leaves $35 million unaccounted for.  So that means that almost half the applicants are neither Committed, Denied-for-cost-effectiveness or Pending.  (I suppose most of them are Denied-for-reasons-other-than-cost-effectiveness.)  That means that at least one applicant had a result other the 3 results shown, so we've got 19 applicants and 23+ results.

While writing this, I was just watching a Funds for Learning webcast [my inability to focus on one thing at a time is no reflection on the quality of the info or presenters], and one of their slides (you can see it right around 21:00 in the recording) showed that program-wide in FY 2019, applicants planned to spend much more on lit fiber with special construction ($175 million) than on leased dark fiber ($69 million) and self-provisioned ($57 million) combined.  So some (perhaps most) of the funding shown in the USAC letter will be used to connect existing lit fiber networks to applicant locations, which means it's not overbuilding.  For context, requests for lit fiber with no special construction total $1,889.7 million.

So how much overbuilding is going on?  No one knows.  But we do know that it isn't much.