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Ten grants went up, seven went down — and reach fell almost everywhere The numbers, aggregated across both programs: 10 projects had their grant amounts revised upward by 5 percent or more, against 7 revised downward, ne ng about $38 million in addi onal commi ed funding. Meanwhile, MIP now plans to pass roughly 19,000 fewer loca ons than originally announced — a 15 percent cut — and AHCP has fallen further, down about 15,000 households, a 44 percent cut. Fi een of the 34 projects will now serve fewer connec ons than the day they were first announced. Run those two lines against each other and the unit economics move in one direc on only: the average cost to connect a single MIP loca on is up 26 percent, from $2,113 to $2,661; the average cost per AHCP household is up 91 percent, from $957 to $1,822. A handful of individual awards carry most of that weight. Oswego County's MIP grant — announced in February 2025 as a $26 million award to build 345 miles of fiber and pass 10,792 homes, businesses and community ins tu ons — now shows a $29.5 million grant against 2,319 loca ons, according to ACLP's tracking: a 79 percent cut in promised reach paired with a 13 percent increase in cost. That's the single largest per-project swing in the dataset, pushing Oswego's cost-per-loca on up 428 percent. Schoharie County's grant climbed from $30 million to $42.4 million, a 41 percent jump, while its planned loca ons grew only 10 percent, from roughly 4,000 to 4,390 — cost outrunning reach by a wide margin even where the project didn't shrink. Two AHCP awards in ACLP's dataset moved in the same direc on: a combined Manha an and Bronx award dropped from 6,080 households to 3,607, a 41 percent cut, and a Buffalo City award fell from 5,033 households to 3,353, down 33 percent. Two projects didn't just shrink — they nearly disappeared. The CNY Open Access award, originally $26 million, was cancelled outright. And a Franklin County project with Development Authority of the North Country (DANC) was cut from 1,600 planned loca ons to two, which ACLP flags separately in its methodology rather than folding into its cost- per-connec on averages, on the reasonable grounds that a grant spread over two loca ons isn't a meaningful unit-cost figure. Why the state says this is happening — and why the explana on only partly holds up ACLP lays out three plausible, overlapping explana ons, and doesn't pretend to have proof of which one dominates. First: CPF-funded projects must be substan ally complete by the end of this year, and slashing scope on a project is one way to guarantee it crosses that finish line on me. Second, and complica ng that theory: Treasury does allow states to request deadline extensions, and New York appears to have secured them for some AHCP projects, pushing that program's comple on deadline to June 30, 2027. ConnectALL requested extensions on MIP projects too, but that request was s ll pending as of the end of July, according to the report — which didn't stop the state from cu ng MIP scope anyway, well before knowing whether it would get more me. The third explana on is the one that should get a tower and fiber contractor's a en on: rising construc on, labor, tariff, and infrastructure-access costs. ACLP notes that ISPs "of all ilk are encountering higher than expected ROW, pole, and related access c osts" — the same line items that have been reshaping bid economics on privately funded builds across the country. MIP and AHCP were both structured without a required grantee match, meaning the state — not a private ISP — absorbs the full cost of these overruns directly. When a pole-a achment nego a on runs long or a right-of-way permit costs more than modeled, there's no private partner sharing that hit. New York eats it alone, which is a fairly direct explana on for why the state might be trimming footprints rather than reques ng more money for the same footprint. ACLP also raises a separate and less fla ering possibility: that private ISPs have simply kept building and "edging out" their own networks into some of these areas since the grants were first announced, making por ons of the publicly funded build redundant. The ins tute has flagged this overbuilding concern in earlier reports on the same two programs, and says it applies here too — meaning some of what's being cut may never have needed public money in the first place. What it means for the contractors bidding this work For firms building out fiber and municipal broadband under these grants, the prac cal takeaway isn't the $38 million headline number — it's that the reach these projects were bid and scoped against has been quietly shrinking on the state's side of the ledger, in some cases by double-digit percentages, without a corresponding public no ce to the market watching them. A contractor pricing follow-on work off an original 10,792-loca on Oswego announcement is pricing against a project that, per ACLP's tracking, is now a 2,319-loca on build. That's not a rounding error in a construc on plan; it's a different project. ACLP's closing argument is a transparency argument, not just a budget one: the fact that this pa ern could only be reconstructed by hand, from sca ered board packets and a buried Treasury footnote, is itself the finding. The ins tute is calling for standardized, ongoing public repor ng on grant scope and cost changes — not because the underlying cost pressures are unusual, but because contractors, county governments, and taxpayers are currently expected to track $300 million in public infrastructure spending by reading the fine print of unrelated board mee ngs. New York didn't build a broadband transparency gap. It just never built the repor ng to close one. Ar cle Credit: h ps://wirelesses mator.com/ar cles/2026/new-yorks- connectall-broadband-grants-got-38-million-more-expensive-and- 34000-connec ons-smaller/ Talleycom.com You Connect the World. We Make it Easy. ® 7 QUARTER 3 2026 SHEET®

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