Microsoft Again Slams America's Shaky Broadband Maps

We've long noted how US telecom policy never really accomplishes much because the underlying data we use to make decisions is hot garbage. The FCC doesn't really spend much time fact checking industry availability and speed claims, resulting in coverage maps that hugely overstate broadband speed, availability, and overall competition. When efforts to improve US broadband mapping pop up, the telecom sector routinely lobbies to kill them, lest somebody actually get a good idea of the broken state of US telecom.

Outside of consumers and consumer groups, nobody much cares about this perpetual dance of dysfunction. One lone exception has been Microsoft, which has been increasingly highlighting the shaky quality of US broadband mapping data. Microsoft has been a major backer of White Space broadband, which utilizes the spectrum freed by the migration to digital television as a new emerging broadband option.

In a recent blog post the company argued that the FCC is potentially overstating US broadband (defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps downstream) availability on a fairly epic scale. In part because the agency isn't verifying ISP claims, but also because when an ISP serves just one home in a census block, the FCC takes that to mean the entire census block is connected to broadband. Microsoft's data shows that 162 million Americans don't technically use "broadband" (25 Mbps), often because they can't get it or it's not affordable.

That's why when the Pai FCC recently released yet another survey claiming that American broadband was wonderful (falsely claiming things like killing net neutrality was the reason why), Microsoft issued a statement attempting to correct the record:

"We share the FCC's commitment to closing the digital divide in rural America, but we have concerns that this report continues to rely on inaccurate coverage data. There is strong evidence, including the FCC's own subscription data and Microsoft data, that broadband is not available to millions of people in America even though the FCC's data says it is. We hope that, moving forward, the FCC adopts appropriate solutions as we've previously outlined to improve the accuracy of broadband mapping so the country can more quickly close the digital divide."

With Ajit Pai's FCC widely now seen as a mindless rubber stamp for the interests of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, there's not much chance it's going to lead the charge on better mapping. Sensing the levees of frustration about to break on this subject, the telecom lobby (US Telecom) has been pushing for its own mapping proposal experts tell me has one real function: to try and keep real, accurate data out of the hands of American consumers:

"I think we should be extremely skeptical of taking ideas from an industry that has chosen to avoid competing with cable companies as the arbiter of accurate mapping that will measure the state of competition and access," Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Ernesto Falcon told Motherboard via email. "They have every interest in hiding the ball of how badly the United States is behind on fiber to the home deployment as they are generally seen as the companies that should be leading that effort."

"We are concerned about the true motivations of this industry-led effort, and fear that the end result will be only marginal improvements in accuracy but a major loss in transparency and public access to the underlying data," [Free Press' Derek] Turner said.

Accurate, transparently available data would highlight how US telcos have all but refused to upgrade their aging DSL networks as they fixate on wireless video, giving cable giants like Comcast and Spectrum a growing monopoly over next generation speeds (and no, 5G isn't magically going to fix it). But if you fix the mapping data and provide America an accurate picture on how it's getting screwed (especially on price), somebody might just get the crazy idea to actually fix it -- and we sure as hell wouldn't want that.