USTelecom-Led Broadband Mapping Pilot Expects July Completion
The USTelecom-led pilot broadband mapping effort in Missouri and Virginia should be done next month and then scale up to some other states this fall, with a national georeferenced broadband serviceable location fabric complete sometime next year, said CostQuest CEO Jim Stegeman in a webinar update Thursday. The BSLF effort, which involves trying to map all the various homes and other locations where broadband service at least could go and separating them from other locations, started three months ago. The national effort, if started today, would take about 12 months, he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Despite problems with current mapping due to shortcomings in FCC Form 477, better mapping "isn't as hard as it seems," said Mike Saperstein, USTelecom vice president-policy and advocacy. The group has been promoting the BSLF approach, which eventually would map every household and business in the U.S., as the foundation to mapping served and unserved areas (see 1903220036). Stegeman said BSLF also would mean an efficient path to normalized constant data from service providers. The route to getting access to the fabric "is an open question" and could depend on the FCC, he said.
Stegeman said data is generally reliable on residential and commercial building locations for urban and suburban areas, but reliability breaks down in rural areas, where there might not be addresses. Geocoding tools that try to transform addresses into geographic coordinates often fall short, with geocoder reference points sometimes being hundreds of feet off from where an actual service location might be, he said.
Much of the update involved how the pilot funded by USTelecom, ITTA, the Wireless ISP Association and others works. BSLF starts with legal boundaries of parcels for a georeferenced point of processing, then layers on tax assessor data about a parcel, which can help identify what structures are there and their use, Stegeman said. Some stickier BSLF issues include farms where a barn might be on a separate parcel from the house and thus look like a structure needing service, he said.
As well as providing visibility to consumers about what carriers serve an area and at what speeds, the fabric approach could incorporate a crowdsourcing process for other information, Stegeman said. He said updates probably need to be done quarterly or semi-annually to best reflect changing structures.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., last week introduced the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act. S-1822 would require the FCC to issue rules to collect more “granular” broadband coverage data (see 1906130029). Saperstein said it has substantial industry support. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he expects a broadband mapping order on August's agenda (see 1906120076).