Senate Commerce Members Vent Frustration About Feds' Broadband Mapping Practices

The House passed the Save the Internet Act net neutrality bill (HR-1644) Wednesday with several amendments aimed at improving FCC broadband coverage data collection and its process for building the annual Telecom Act Section 706 broadband deployment report (see 1904100062). A group of House Communications Subcommittee Democrats earlier this month wrote the FCC raising concerns about faulty data included in the agency's draft 2017 Section 706 broadband deployment report that led Chairman Ajit Pai to overstate broadband deployment improvement for that year (see 1902190057). BarrierFree last month acknowledged an error in its Form 477 filings of December 2017 broadband deployment data (see 1903070054).

“I hope we will soon have legislation” aimed at “better coordination and information sharing” among the FCC, NTIA and Agriculture Department as they administer their respective “broadband deployment programs,” said Senate Commerce Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss. “It is important that” those agencies “work cooperatively to coordinate and share information on broadband coverage data and broadband deployment programs.” He noted the FCC's efforts to improve Form 477, saying it “asks providers to submit data about where they could provide service to a location within a service interval without an extraordinary commitment of resources.”

“Too much talking has gone on about mapping and we need to do more action,” said Senate Commerce ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. “I definitely support having accurate information, but I think we've got to get to the next phase, of why” there's a digital divide to begin with. “We just have too much competitive disadvantage by not fully serving” rural and other areas of the U.S., Cantwell said.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said she believes it's time for the federal government to “do some things differently” in its collection of broadband coverage data, citing her view that the FCC's Form 477-based maps have become obsolete. Congress' role needs to be ensure all U.S. consumers are able to benefit from broadband advances like 5G.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said she has become frustrated with ISPs' frequent excuse that “West Virginia in particular doesn’t have as good deployment of broadband” because of “our terrain.” Capito has “a hard time believing that because I believe for decades [we’ve] been able to communicate with people on the moon, and we can’t figure out a way to deploy broadband in a mountainous state.” It's “just an excuse” for “why we haven’t had deployment into maybe the less profitable areas than more populated areas,” she said.

“What I know from [the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation's] in-depth review of the FCC’s existing coverage maps is that they are clearly wrong,” said President Mike McCormick. “In essence, the FCC’s map showed that Mississippi was 98 percent covered with mobile broadband services, which Farm Bureau clearly disputes.”

Competitive Carriers Association Senior Vice President Tim Donovan said “agencies across the government” should “work in coordination to produce the most reliable coverage maps possible.” The FCC has the most work to do to improve the coverage maps, including investigating and rectifying “overstated coverage figures, and take steps to improve the next mobile coverage data collection,” he said. NTIA “should continue its ongoing efforts to refresh the national broadband map and [USDA] should base rural broadband funding programs on improved data.”

USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter cited the group's broadband mapping initiative (see 1903210041) as an example of industry-led work to improve coverage data. “Part of the challenge is our nation lacks a comprehensive connectivity map indicating precisely where high-speed broadband service is available and, most importantly, where it is not,” he said. The USTelecom initiative “will deliver a more detailed and cohesive view of where broadband is and is not.”

Hood Canal Communications General Manager Mike Obilzalo was among those echoing Donovan in seeking a simplified data challenge process. Ookla Vice President-Strategic Initiatives Chip Strange urged the federal government to “move beyond the focus on speed.”

NCTA, which proposed revisions for how the FCC collects Form 477 data used to create the broadband map (see here), in a docket 11-10 posting Wednesday laid out issues the agency would need to tackle to adopt its plan. It suggested a reworded definition of "availability" that involves served areas requiring only routine installations such as a drop instead of actual network extension. Possible approaches for creating shapefiles are using network maps, homes passed data, node boundary data or grids, and it said the agency needs to ensure companies have flexibility to use different data sources. It said there should be two levels of shapefile data verification: reviewing the filing and asking questions about anomalous reports, and crowdsourcing. The association said using shapefiles would require a different means of calculating national availability figures for the Section 706 report, and that could also result in the agency determining the percentage of land area served in each partially served census block. It also raised questions about Microsoft's criticisms of Form 477 data validity (see 1903180051).