Another Nuance of FCC Broadband Maps

There is one nuance of the Federal Communications Commission maps that doesn’t seem to be talked about. Internet service providers (ISPs) are only supposed to show coverage on the FCC maps for locations where they are able to serve within ten business days of a customer’s request for service. Any ISP that is claiming areas it won’t serve that quickly is exaggerating its coverage on the FCC maps. That can have real-life consequences. Consider the pockets of unserved areas inside cities. We worked with an urban area recently where we identified nearly 200 such unserved pockets. If those pockets were identified correctly on the FCC maps, then an ISP could ask for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) or other grant funding to extend a network into these small areas. But if they are claimed as served, then it would be an uphill battle to get grant funding. In rural areas, any ISP that claims to offer speeds greater than 100/20 Mbps is effectively stopping grant money from funding unserved areas. I can’t imagine any easy way to estimate the overall impact of areas that are overclaimed because of ISPs ignoring the 10-day rule—but it’s not hard to imagine that this could represent an additional 5%-10% of unserved places in rural areas that are incorrectly identified as served. It’s hard to even imagine the extent of the problem in urban areas.