$300 Million And All I Got Was This Lousy Broadband Map

[Commentary] Daily's take on the National Broadband Map: A pretty map with some basic features that falls way short of what our country needs.

When he types in his address in Lafayette the results he gets raise questions. For example, they cite "Lafayette City Parish Consolidated Government" as a provider (when it should be LUSFiber) but the only services they cite are 100Mbps-1Gbps. In actuality, the highest residential service LUSFiber offers is 50Mbps, though you can get a 100Mbps service, and the only 1Gbps service they offer is on their dedicated carrier-class network, not their shared residential network. So here's a specific example of how the map seems to be confusing business vs. residential broadband. One of the most upsetting things about these results is that they bury information about upload capacity. The main results page doesn't even acknowledge that there's a distinction to be made. It's only once you click on a provider you get to see what that upload capacity is. It's as if they don't think upload capacity is all that important. And yet again I'm finding inconsistencies between the data in this map and that available on providers' public websites. Another missing piece of information is something that many others have already pointed out, namely the lack of any data about the price of service. The map's tagline is "How connected is my community?" but you can't answer that question fully without knowing how expensive service is. Some providers could claim they offer 1Gbps to every building, but if the service is too expensive for anyone to afford can we really claim that community's connected? And, not surprisingly given the many other missing data points, there's no mention of usage restrictions or bandwidth caps with any of these services, which can make a dramatic difference as to how consumers can actually use these pipes.