Is Three Weeks Enough Time For NTIA/RUS To Pick Winners?

So the deadline for submitting applications for the first chunk of money from the broadband stimulus programs is basically today. NTIA and RUS have also announced that they're giving themselves a Sept 14th deadline for when they're going to unveil the finalists who made it through the first round of vetting. At this point they'll accept input from governors to help determine which projects in a state to fund.

But let's pause for a moment and consider something: is three weeks enough time to read let alone vet let alone weigh the relative merits of what is almost certainly hundreds of applications? Because between today and Sept 14th that's basically all the time that's left.

I'm wondering this in particular because I've had a chance to review a couple of applications and they don't make for lightweight, breezy reading. It seems like par for the course for each application to be at least 50 pages. And therefore I think it's safe to say that it's going to take at least a couple of hours to initially just read through an application.

Now let's do a little math. I don't know how many applications NTIA has received, but I think it's safe to peg that number as north of 500. I say that because I've heard Calix tout that they alone have at least 100 of their customers they know to be applying, and those are just a portion of the fiber projects looking for funds, not even counting what's been reported to be a much larger number of wireless projects. So really the number could easily be 1,000 or more. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if it ran up into the thousands given that the government's servers couldn't even handle the load of people rushing to submit their applications last week.

But let's just stick with 500 for now. So 500 applications at two hours a piece, just to read through once. Now we need to multiply that by three as each application is supposed to be handled by three volunteer reviewers. With this in mind we're already at 3,000 man hours. And this number could be much higher given that my guesstimate of 500 total applications is likely woefully low. I could see this being 5,000-10,000 man hours just to handle the initial read-throughs if the volume of applications is as high as I think it is.

Then you've got to add on some amount of time to do some real vetting. I'm hoping that includes things like crunching any numbers that are given to verify that they add up, doing some research both online and on the phone into the deployers' respective histories and to confirm with the communities that they know about the projects and are supportive of them, and then doing some qualitative analysis about whether or not a project passes the smell test and that their financial model appears sound.

To do this right I'd think you'd need at least 5-10 hours. Anything less than that feels like you'd just be rubber stamping these applications without fully understanding what they're proposing. I'm going to give the process the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they're able to do this deeper research with just one person or through the coordination of multiple people, rather than each of the three reviewers having to do their own independent verification and analysis. Even still, we're talking about another 2,500-5,000 man hours, and again, if the total number of applications goes far beyond 500, this time commitment just increases, upwards of 5, 10, maybe even 20,000 hours.

I don't know if they're going to do this here as they may leave this up to the governors to decide, but at some point there does need to be a consideration and valuation of the relative merits of competing projects. I'll leave that out for now, though it will need to be factored into the calculus at some point.

So already we're up to a minimum of 5,000 man hours of work being required to do even the most basic of reviewing on the smallest number of applications I can imagine they've received. But I could easily see that number go as high as 30,000 man hours depending on how many applications they actually receive, how long it takes to actually review, and whether or not they do the deeper analysis just once or multiple times.

To put this into perspective, let's assume each reviewer has 60 hours in his or her week to work on this, which is likely high given that these are volunteers. So 180 hours total available per reviewer over the next three weeks that we have before the deadline. On the low end that could mean we'd only need 30 reviewers to get the job done. But on the high end we'd need closer to 200.

This then begs the question: are there 200 people out there willing and able to volunteer their time that have the in-depth expertise on the technology and business of deploying both wireline and wireless networks necessary to do a proper vetting of these applications that aren't tainted by ties that are too close to a service provider, equipment maker, or otherwise to have unbiased opinions about which networks should get funding?

Even if there are that many out there, has NTIA been able to find them all and get them committed to this process?

And perhaps even more important, what assurances do we have that these volunteers are qualified and unbiased? How do we know they're going to be capable of doing proper, thorough analysis of these applications?

The reason I bring all this up is because I'm worried that while I, as well as many others, grew quite frustrated at how long it took for government to put out the rules for what projects should qualify for funding, we now seem to be in a position of rushing through the next steps.

This is very worrisome as I think it's as if not more important to pick the right projects as it is to get the rules right in the first place. And yet while it took six months to get the rules written, we're now looking at only three weeks to vet the projects.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do at this point. I'm hesitant to suggest pushing the date back for when they announce finalists as that likely means pushing back even further when projects can start getting awarded funding. And yet I can't help worrying that this vetting process is not going to be as thorough as it needs to be to make sure we're giving money to the projects that deserve it most given the time constraints.

As it stands, I feel like we're stuck having to closer our eyes, take the plunge, and hope that everything works out OK in the end. But given that we're playing with billions of dollars of our money as well as having a huge part of our broadband future at stake, this isn't a comfortable position to be in, and I can only hope that we can find a way to do this better for the next round of funding.