Broadband Maps Should Detail New Home Construction, Lost Housing, NCTA Says

cable group said wasn't as good as its plan (see 1904150059). Executives from NCTA and Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Midco met Tuesday with 11 officials from the Wireline Bureau and the Office of Economics and Analytics about NCTA's proposal to retire census block reporting in favor of polygon shapefile data (see 1905030060). The FCC should better define areas deemed served by a provider, NCTA said, such as by whether adding a new customer would entail a standard installation or if the location in question would require a network extension at a customer's expense. The association proposes mapping data incorporate crowdsourcing to supplement Form 477 filings, with consumer-reported data, especially on broadband speeds, being verified. It questions whether the FCC should "devote time and money" to creating its own location fabric but suggested it could use data from other federal agencies and not just provider information, and decide how to verify "accuracy of the roughly 150 million locations" cataloged across the country and how such data will be updated as new houses are built and others lost through natural disasters. NCTA wants the FCC to adopt the shapefile proposal at commissioners' Aug. 2 meeting so the new data collection tools can be used in a September 2020 Form 477 filing cycle.