Best Practices for Broadband Fabric Challenges Announced

The Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Data Task Force (Task Force) announces recommended best practices for submitting bulk challenges to the most recent version of the Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric (Fabric) data. The Task Force also provides notice that bulk Fabric challenges submitted as much in advance of March 15, 2023, as possible are most likely to be reviewed and adjudicated in time to be accounted for in the next iteration of the Fabric (version three) to be released in conjunction with the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) filing window for data as of June 30, 2023 that is due no later than September 1, 2023. Preparing a bulk Fabric challenge is fundamentally a geospatial process. Entities therefore should not attempt to upload as a bulk Fabric challenge a list of addresses they have compiled for another purpose (e.g., a list of addresses from a billing system or from an E911 database), though these datasets can serve as a helpful starting point for producing a valid bulk Fabric challenge. As an initial step, challengers can attempt to join this type of address-based data to the address information included in the Fabric in order to associate unique Fabric location IDs with the locations in the prospective challenger’s data. But the challenger should not simply upload as a challenge all of the data it is unable to match to an existing location ID using an address matching join. In other words, the fact that an address is missing from the Fabric does not necessarily indicate that the location is missing from the Fabric. Rather than simply filing a Type 1 challenge consisting of a list of addresses, the challenger should next proceed to a geospatial analysis of both its address data and the data included in the Fabric.