False Progress Painted By Bad Data > Broadband + The Digital Divide

This is an updated post to an earlier one that was posted Tue May 11 on this blog (see below)

Microsoft Data Shows That The FCC's Broadband Maps Are Fantasy

 

 

Broadband

from the rose-colored-glasses dept

Fri, May 14th 2021 4:46am — Karl Bode

"We've noted for a very long time that despite a lot of lip service about broadband, the U.S. government still doesn't have a very good idea of where broadband is or isn't available. There's a long line of reasons for this, including political pressure by regional monopolies that very much don't want a lack of competition or these coverage gaps to be apparent (somebody might get the crazy idea to try and fix the problem!). The FCC has also long been criticized for methodology that declares a census block (which can be hundreds of square miles in rural areas) "served" with broadband if just one home can theoretically get service from an ISP.

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After decades of this, the government last year finally took action and passed the DATA Act, which tasks the FCC with fixing the problem. The Biden FCC last February also belatedly announced a "task force" to examine the problem in more detail. But we're still years away from any of these changes being implemented (assuming they're even implemented competently), something of cold comfort to those struggling to afford internet access right now during a pandemic and economic crisis.

Meanwhile, the problem persists . . .

Note that even this data isn't entirely accurate because it's measuring what speeds are currently being used, not what's always available. That means users may have access to faster speeds, but potentially didn't subscribe due to high costs. That in turn is due to a lack of competition, something experts say also isn't accurately measured by the FCC. But it's not just Microsoft data that showcases how the FCC's broadband availability maps aren't remotely connected to reality.

> If you want to see the problem in personalized detail, just spend a little time with the FCC's $350 million broadband map, which all but hallucinates competitors, availability, and speeds -- while excluding (at telecom industry behest) any meaningful measurement of a key metric: price. $350 million is a steep price tag just to look at the world through rose-colored glasses.

Of course, industry has historically opposed broadband mapping reform, because it only highlights a lack of access and competition, driving folks to action. The false progress painted by bad data is also routinely used by telecom-allied lawmakers (like Ajit Pai) to justify the dismantling of government oversight or the rubber stamping of megamergers that reduce competition even further. And while the resulting "digital divide" is often treated as a problem that magically appeared one day, it's important to remember that this is a policy choice, and the direct result of twenty years of government policies that prioritized the interests of regional monopolies (not coincidentally tethered to our intelligence gathering systems).

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Filed Under: broadband, competition, data, fcc

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This is a map of America’s broadband problem

A county-by-county look at the broadband gap

By Russell Brandom and William Joel May 10, 2021, 9:00am EDT

 

"If broadband access was a problem before 2020, the pandemic turned it into a crisis. As everyday businesses moved online, city council meetings or court proceedings became near-inaccessible to anyone whose connection couldn’t support a Zoom call. Some school districts started providing Wi-Fi hotspots to students without a reliable home connection. In other districts, kids set up in McDonald’s parking lots just to get a reliable enough signal to do their homework. After years of slowly widening, the broadband gap became impossible to ignore.

So as we kick off our Infrastructure Week series, we wanted to show the scope of the problem ourselves.

This map shows where the broadband problem is worst — the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed. (That’s already a pretty low threshold for calling something “high-speed internet,” but since it’s the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, we’ll stick with it.)

Maps like this are important because, for much of the past decade, the scale of the problem has been maddeningly difficult to pin down. Most large-scale assessments of American broadband access rely on FCC data, a notoriously inaccurate survey drawn from ISPs’ own descriptions of the areas they serve. Even as the commission tries to close the broadband gap, its maps have been misleading policymakers about how wide the gap really is.

Instead of the FCC’s data, we drew on an anonymized dataset collected by Microsoft through its cloud services network, published in increments by the company over the past 18 months. If the FCC monitors the connections that providers say they’re offering, this measures what they’re actually getting. You can roll over specific counties to see the exact percentage of households connected at broadband speed, and the data is publicly available on GitHub if you want to check our work or drill down further. It’s not a perfect dataset, since device speeds can also be affected by bad routers or slow processors that have nothing to do with the underlying connection. But for better or worse, these are the speeds users actually experience, which puts the dataset worlds ahead of what you’d get from the FCC.