After Decades Of Dysfunction, The FCC Finally Shores Up Terrible Broadband Mapping

Despite a lot of political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide, U.S. policymakers still don't fully know where broadband is or isn't available in the U.S. They have some well-informed notions, but outside analysts have long made it clear that the maps the government uses to shape policy and award subsidies are often an idiotic hallucination (plug your address into their current map if you need evidence).

Senators eager to get their chunk of a massive infusion of new broadband funding finally voted for the Broadband DATA Act in 2020. The ACT requires that the FCC do a much better job verifying ISP coverage claims, include crowdsourced data, and stop its idiotic, decades-old methodology of declaring an entire census block served" with broadband if just one home in that block can get service (seriously).

This week, the agency will release the first fruits of its labor, a pre-production draft of new broadband map that tries to more accurately determine broadband availability:

Historically, the FCC's maps have been based on broadband availability data collected at just
the census block level rather than the location level, which kept unserved locations hidden if
they were in partially served census blocks.

Keep in mind taxpayers have already spent upwards of $350 million on the existing, shitty maps, which the agency based all of its policy decisions on. For thirty years these bad maps have helped obscure a lack of competition and the real impact of monopoly power, which is why entrenched telecom monopolies have historically fought against improving them.

It literally took decades and an act of Congress for the FCC to exhibit even baseline levels of competency as it pertains to accurately mapping what's increasingly viewed as an essential utility. And we're still not quite there yet; this first incarnation is very much going to be considered a beta.

Getting this right is kind of important given there's more than $50 billion in COVID relief and infrastructure funds about to head out to states, and monopolies have long abused bad maps to grab money they often don't deserve.

As we've noted previously, there's still a lot of concerns that the FCC is allowing ISPs to overstate availability, haven't yet developed a working challenge system that allows states and municipalities to challenge ISP data that's intentionally misleading, and are still basing everything primarily on data from ISPs that have a longstanding vested interest in downplaying speed problems and coverage gaps.

In New York State, for example, officials who got an early look at the FCC's new map still found 31,000 locations that weren't included. And state leaders have repeatedly told me in interviews that they're not confident in the FCC's data challenge process. They also say the FCC has discarded a lot of the hard work states have done mapping broadband while the FCC spent a decade napping. On top of that, there are remaining concerns by researchers about how transparently accessible this data will be once it's finally released to the public.

Again, any improvement in the data and methodology is welcome. Bad FCC maps help downplay broadband competition issues and open the door to subsidy fraud, so getting this right is extremely important. But it's still monumentally pathetic it took this long to even get this far, and there's still plenty of work that needs to be done.