Map to Nowhere

[Commentary] Why is it so incredibly difficult to figure out how much of the nation has access to affordable broadband?

For the past 15 years, the Federal Communications Commission has been required by law to collect data on high-speed Internet access. For the most part that information has been fairly useless for the public or even for policy types. Up until recently, for example, a telecom company only needed to serve one customer in a ZIP code to get credit for serving everyone. Even so, good luck figuring out which company it was; the FCC's report scrubbed the names of the actual providers. In essence, the FCC was going out of its way to prevent useful information from being publicly released. Attempts by public interest and consumer advocates to get the FCC to release this information repeatedly failed. Fortunately, there are ways to collect even better information that are much cheaper and don't require bureaucratic soul-searching. At the New America Foundation, where we both work, we've partnered with the Planet Lab Consortium and Google to offer a tool that lets anyone measure the performance of his or her broadband connection, called Measurement Lab. To date, people have run this test more than a half-billion times, giving us 300 Terabytes of data to work with. (That's more than 150,000 iPod shuffles.) We make all this data public, allowing people to see actual broadband speeds and compare them among countries, US states, and cities.