RWA Concerned About Mobility Fund II Challenge Process
The Rural Wireless Association raised concerns about parts of the FCC’s rules for the Mobility Fund II challenge process, in a Wednesday filing in docket 10-208. “In particular, RWA is very concerned about the … decision to move forward with…
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the use of a square kilometer grid cell as a part of its ‘multi-step geospatial-data-processing approach,’” RWA said. “Specifically, the [FCC] ‘will determine whether a challenger’s speed test points substantially cover a challenged area (i.e., cover at least 75 percent of the challenged area) by buffering each speed test point that reports a downstream speed less than 5 Mbps, calculating the buffered area, and then comparing the area of the buffered points to the challengeable area within a 1 km by 1 km grid cell.’” But, RWA said, in most of rural America, roads are situated directly on the borders of a 1-mile by 1-mile grid. A square kilometer grid cell “could be entirely encapsulated within a square mile road grid cell, leaving no access to drive any portion of a single kilometer-based grid cell,” RWA said. The FCC’s decision “to ignore this reality has yielded a challenge scheme in which thousands of kilometer grid squares lack the necessary roads to access and test the claimed coverage using drive tests,” RWA said.