FCC Must Deal With More Than 4M Mapping Broadband Availability Challenges
The FCC has received more than 4 million availability challenges through its online mapping portal, said Eduard Bartholme, deputy chief of the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, during a NATOA webinar Monday. Bartholme demonstrated how the map portal works, in several locations.
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“We’re busy,” Bartholme said, when asked about addressing the challenges. “Here’s an understatement for you,” joked Mike Lynch, NATOA legislative director.
Providers have 60 days to tell the FCC whether they will dispute or concede the challenge, Bartholme said, noting the process sometimes takes less time. “We are seeing providers concede some things relatively quickly and also dispute some things relatively quickly,” he said. Providers then have another 60 days to work with the challenger, he said.
If the sides can’t reach agreement, the dispute comes to the FCC for adjudication, to look at the evidence “and make a call,” Bartholme said. “We’re hands-on with a lot of things right now,” he said. When challenges come in, the FCC does a cursory check, he said. “When we say adjudication, we mean adjudication -- we are looking at the evidence the challenger brought and the evidence the provider submits in response,” he said: “That’s not automated at the moment.”
Location challenges are independent of availability and the FCC hasn’t reported numbers yet, Bartholme said. One million new locations were added between versions one and two of the maps, he noted. Not all were the result of challenges, he said. “There’s a certain amount of map improvement that happens based on better data that our vendor gets and reviews between each cycle of release,” he said.
There’s a major difference between broadband access and adoption, said Mike Conlow, Cloudflare director-network strategy. In urban areas, broadband is available to almost everyone, but the adoption rate is 73%, he said. In rural areas, 64% have access to broadband, but most subscribe to service where available.
“There’s a general sense that we don’t have a tremendous amount of competition in the broadband market in the U.S.” and more than half of Americans are stuck with one high-speed offering, Conlow said. The FCC faces “a very hard,” perhaps “impossible” challenge trying to map every serviceable location in the U.S., he said.
Experts on the webcast estimated only 10,000-20,000 new sites will be added as a result of location challenges, and others will likely be removed from the map, especially in the most rural areas. They cited ranches in Texas that don’t have power and show up as broadband locations on the map.
“There’s not a lot of incentive to point out too many locations at the moment,” Conlow said.
There are questions about many of the locations identified in the maps, agreed Brenden Staab, CTC Technology & Energy lead-geographic information system design team.
The map is a big improvement over what local governments had available before, said Lynch, a former broadband official in Boston. “This is really a quantum leap from where we once were and it’s a lot of detail,” he said.