(a) 5G Fund support will be made available for geographic areas identified as eligible by public notice.

(b) Coverage units for purposes of conducting competitive bidding and disbursing support based on square kilometers will be identified by public notice for each area eligible for support.

(c) The geographic areas identified as eligible for support in the 5G Fund Phase I auction will be converted, to, and made available in, the form of hexagons at the resolution 9 level (hex-9s) using the H3 standardized geospatial indexing system defined in § 1.7001(a)(20) of this chapter. All eligible hex-9s will then be grouped into census tracts for purposes of bidding in the auction.

(1) The hex-9s that are eligible for 5G Fund support in the 5G Fund Phase I auction will be generated using the following process:

(i) Overlay resolution 11 hexagons (hex-11s) on the “raw” mobile coverage polygons submitted in the Broadband Data Collection for 5G outdoor stationary coverage at speeds of at least 7/1 Mbps on unsubsidized areas, and on urban areas. If the centroid (i.e., the geographic center point) of the hex-11, overlaps any of those boundaries, then the entire hex-11 is considered covered by that boundary and “served.”

(ii) Divide the number of served grandchild hex-11s belonging to the grandparent hex-9 by the total number of grandchild hex-11s belonging to the grandparent hex-9 to determine the percentage of the hex-9 that is considered served. The centroid of a hex-11 must fall within the boundary of United States or its territories to be included in this calculation. For hex-9s with both land and water grandchild hex-11s, only the land hex-11s are considered in this calculation.

(iii) If a “substantial majority” of the grandchild hex-11s belonging to a grandparent hex-9 are served, then the entire hex-9 will be considered served. For purposes of this determination, a “substantial majority” is 70% or more.

(2) After completing the process described in paragraphs (c)(1)(i) through (iii) of this section, any hex-9 that is not considered served and that also contains at least one location or some portion of a road will be eligible for support in the 5G Fund Phase I auction.