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Telecom Lobby Suddenly Pretends To Care About Accurate Broadband Maps

Telecom Lobby Suddenly Pretends To Care About Accurate Broadband Maps

5 years ago
Anonymous $Dftgs0JzgE

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190322/09522441854/telecom-lobby-suddenly-pretends-to-care-about-accurate-broadband-maps.shtml

For a country that likes to talk about "being number one" a lot, that's sure not reflected in the United States' broadband networks, or the broadband maps we use to determine which areas lack adequate broadband or competition (resulting in high prices and poor service). Our terrible broadband maps are, of course, a feature not a bug; ISPs have routinely lobbied to kill any efforts to improve data collection and analysis, lest somebody actually realize the telecom market is a broken mono/duopoly whose dysfunction reaches into every aspect of tech.

If you want to see our terrible broadband maps at work, you need only go visit the FCC's $350+ million broadband availability map, which is based on the Form 477 data collected from ISPs. If you plug in your address, you'll find that not only does the FCC not include prices (at industry behest), the map hallucinates speed and ISP availability at most U.S. addresses. Part of the problem is that the FCC declares an entire region "served" with broadband if just one home in a census block has service. Again, ISPs fight efforts to reform this in a bid to protect the status quo.

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