Why Isn’t Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned By The Public?
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. The FCC’s past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of competitiveness: price.
You only need to spend a few minutes plugging your address into the FCC’s old map to notice how the agency comically overstates broadband competition and available speeds. After being mandated by Congress in 2020 by the Broadband DATA Act, the FCC struck a new, $44 million contract with a company named Costquest to develop a new map.
While an improvement, the new map still has problems with over-stating coverage and available speeds (try it for yourself). And the FCC still refuses to collect and share pricing data, which industry opposes because it would only work to further highlight monopolization, consolidation, and muted competition.
But there’s another problem. As broadband industry consultant Doug Dawson notes, the public doesn’t even own the finalized broadband mapping data. Costquest does:
“…the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.”
In addition to the $44.9 million the FCC paid Costquest to create the maps, Costquest received another $49.9 million from the NTIA to provide the databases and maps for the $42 billion broadband subsidy and grant program (included in the 2021 infrastructure bill). Third parties (like states trying to shore up access to affordable broadband) have to pay Costquest even more money to access the data.
So it’s all been incredibly profitable for Costquest. But taxpayers are closing in on paying nearly half a billion dollars for broadband maps that not only still aren’t fully accurate, but which they can’t transparently access and don’t own despite paying for.
That’s fairly insane any way you slice it, and as Dawson notes, it’s a detriment to the cash-strapped folks who could be helping expand access to affordable broadband (and helping fact-check the data):
“Our industry is full of data geeks who could work wonders if they had free access to the mapping fabric database. There are citizen broadband committees and retired folks in every community who are willing to sift through the mapping data to understand broadband trends and to identify locations where ISPs have exaggerated coverage claims. But citizens willing to do this research are not going to pay the fees to get access to the data – and shouldn’t have to.”
For decades, feckless and corrupt state and federal regulators turned a blind eye as regional telecom monopolies dominated the market and crushed all competition underfoot, resulting in spotty access, high prices, and terrible customer service. Usually under the pretense that “deregulation” (read: very little real consumer protection oversight) had resulted in immense innovation.
Not only did government not address (or often even acknowledge) that problem, they’re still proving somewhat incapable when it comes to transparently mapping its impact.
The $42 billion in subsidies flowing to many states to shore up access is a good thing, but its impact will most assuredly be corrupted by feckless bureaucrats who can’t stand up to industry giants, aren’t keen on the idea of data transparency, and will lack the courage necessary to ensure giant monopolies with a history of fraud (like Comcast and AT&T) don’t pocket most of the funds.
Filed Under: BEAD grants, broadband, broadband mapping, competition, duopolies, fcc, gigabit fiber, high speed internet, mapping, subsidies, telecom
Companies: costquest
Comments on “Why Isn’t Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned By The Public?”
The updated FCC broadband map got my address wrong where it was right in the first one.
The old one says AT&T fiber available at 1Gb. Current map says AT&T fiber no longer available. Considering I signed up for AT&T fiber after the second map was made, that can’t be right or AT&T paused new subscriptions. I rather doubt the latter.
The FCC could force the ISPs to provide more accurate maps, but that would require having a spine. As everyone knows, a spinectomy is required for FCC service.
Public funded should == Public Data
Anything paid for by the taxpayers, whether it’s data about broadband availability, or pharmaceutical research, should be public domain and openly available.
Re:
The 100M$ received by Costquest to create the map may not be a very large amount of money (based on my experience in cartography, about a half has certainly be used in project management that real survey) and may also be under-provisioned for such a large country as USA.
This gives at the end, most of the time, incomplete data with useless tools to edit the data.
So, if nobody is willing to pour anymore money into it, the situation will stay as such, a temporary project (in a grain of salt in the 42B$ total budget), because it would cost much more to provide decent tools and complete data to the public.
Of course, if a very small amount (let say 1%) of the 100M$ would have been given to independent open projects, we (the public) would own the (complete) data and the (great) tools.
But I stopped dreaming about it for a long time.
Once
Those on the hill figured they could MAKE their jobs Almost permanent, They Cut so many agencies and stopped enforcement Everywhere.
They need to learn something, and UNTIL we stop Voting them into Office-
We need 2 added choices on elections. “None of the above” and “Vote of no Confidence”. Iv even had those monitoring the pole, say it would be nice.
Very few states have them, and Very few nations even have that selection.
Charter/Spectrum has always lied about my neighborhood in Massachusetts. They claim 1G/35M on the map but they only offer 300M/10M.
But since there are no alternatives where I live and they do not allow anonymous reports, I’m afraid of retaliation from Charter if I report the lie. If I lose broadband access, I lose my job.
I work for a small regional service provider and am responsible for generating our coverage data to comply with FCC regulations.
We are somewhat unique in that we are required by law to submit this data, but we do not participate in any of the federal programs because these programs are geared towards larger providers.
We receive zero, I repeat ZERO, financial assistance from the government to generate this data. No one sees a dime, as far as I know.
So, it would seem your premise is incorrect. The data is public (assuming the provider doesn’t invoke any exceptions), but it is not paid for by the public. The burden is on the provider as a matter of regulatory compliance.
Our data is as accurate as we can make it without having to go out to every location and manually verify coverage. The cost in that case would be astronomical (we only cover 44k locations and are a team of less than 10!). To make our data absolutely correct would bankrupt us.
Lol! Wait till you find out about how our “founding fathers” perpetrated a successful genocide against the native people in north america. And how government institutions are using NAGPRA to hide their sins. How we live in a corporate facist state…. How we are the bad guys
Active bandwidth monitoring?
So, can anyone think of another way to gather this information? For example, Ookla hosts speed tests. If wouldn’t take much to add address information to a report.
You could even measure bandwidth to the FCC website for each visitor, or with the number of compromisable routers online, implement a project to measure speed and patch the router at the same time.
Likely an ISP is required to know which internal IP address is used by which subscriber at which location, so plenty of opportunities to actually measure speed independently.
Better, but not really good
Tried the map myself. It’s technically correct (the best kind of correct to many people), but kinda overstates things.
The primary source of internet broadband is Charter Cable (Spectrum). The available rate is rather overstated; the 1000 Mbps shown is really only about 200 to 300 Mbps for the vast majority of users (including myself).
Then there are three satellite companies whose download rates are VASTLY overstated, being the ideal download with perfect alignment of the dish, and no one else using the service.
Then there’s the local cellular phone company, which shouldn’t even be on the list as it’s “broadband” service is a laughable 200 kbps (best case).
Finally, there’s good old (and I do mean OLD) copper phone connection, with a laughably unobtainable 50 Mbps (more like 2 Mbps to the vast majority of customers).
And they got millions of dollars to make this info available on a website? How do I get in on this action? Oh, right – be a corrupt businessman/politician willing to sell out their fellow citizens for a quick buck.
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WTF is this?
Its one thing to make this claim, but then to delete the post itself, man, that’s nasty.
An explanation might be in order folks.
To end corruption:
Make Lobbying illegal.
Mental exercise:
Post three reasons why lobbying should be legal.
Re: RE: Lobbying
Have you ever sent a letter (or email or phone call) to an elected official trying to convince them to agree with you on an issue? Congratulations, you’ve just lobbied them.
Do we expect our elected officials to know everything about every area that they pass laws on? If not the experts that they talk to will be lobbying them.
Most importantly, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” [emphasis mine] The right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is lobbying.
Bad data=bad maps
Allowing ISPs to report advertised speeds vs acutely. Including “could serve within 10 days, without any proof that is even possible. . No penalty for overstating coverage. Every incentive is there to overstate coverage and speeds (and latency), including the abysmal 25/3 as “served”. The system is heavily slanted to the provider and not achieving #broadband4all.
The government wastes so much of our money
Why is the government hiring a company to gather information that is already sold? All your data are belong to any number of shady businesses. Want to know anyone’s SSN, bank balance, phone number, address, credit score, demographic info, medical history, purchasing habits? That’s all for sale, individually or in bulk. Your ISP and bandwidth is no doubt in there along with shoe size and favorite color, and could certainly be bought immediately in greater detail and accuracy for much less.
All that releasing the map will do is reveal that it's a lie. We already know that.
Example:
I know that Verizon is allowed to claim that they have fibre-to-the-home for the entirety of the township that I live in, because they have deployed FIOS in one tiny corner of it. Where I live – in an affluent suburban neighbourhood – they not only don’t have FIOS deployed, they don’t even have any working copper pairs for DSL. When my copper failed a few years ago, they simply gave me a deal on a wireless home terminal, and said that it would cost me some five-figure amount if I actually wanted my DSL repaired.
Charter Spectrum lies about its deployment, but at least deigns to provide me with a mostly-working link, which is supposedy 300M/10M but actually performs about a tenth of that. And it’s a mostly-working connection; it has at least an outage or two a month. (And its server appears to forget the MAC address of my cable modem about annually, necessitating a LENGTHY call with tech support to get it turned back on.) Their prevarication has been so bad that the state actually tried to revoke their business license a few years back, but was forced to cave because Charter was sure to retaliate by wrecking the network infrastructure on the way out, and so many customers have no alternative. (That is, the monopoly power of Charter exceeds the power of the state government to enforce the law.)
Wow. And you actually avoided completely the entire aspect of handing politicians a bucket of cash to create/change legislation in favor of the people who made the “payment”.
That is truly impressive.
You’re a politician right?
Lobbying is “bribery” when you add “cash” to the “request”.
Of course you knew that, but did your best to obfuscate.
If you’re not a politician, you missed your calling.