Chairman Wheeler's Response to Members of Congress Regarding Mobile Broadband Coverage

On March 1, several members of the Senate Communications Subcommittee wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler urging the FCC to work with stakeholders to identify more accurate ways to measure available mobile wireless coverage. On April 4, Chairman Wheeler responded by saying the FCC is currently working to improve how it measures mobile coverage. Chairman Wheeler said the biggest challenge involved the process of data collection.

He wrote, "For a variety of reasons, the data collected by the states and third party commercial vendors did not always accurately reflect the real world experiences of your constituents. Recognizing the need to improve our mobile coverage data, the Commission adopted an order in 2013 that required mobile wireless data collection from one of the most reliable sources available -- the mobile wireless carriers themselves....In addition, please rest assured that, given the importance of this issue, the Commission remains open to working with stakeholders regarding additional data sources, including new third party sources, and methods that we can employ to obtain more reliable information on mobile broadband coverage...The Commission is also seeking to provide greater public accessibility into the data it collects. Specifically, to better serve the American public, the Commission is seeking additional funds in the upcoming fiscal year to provide improved mapping capabilities of mobile coverage data. Unfortunately, in the past two fiscal years the Commission was not successful in securing funding requests that would have enabled us to update the National Broadband Map. As a result, the data reflected on that map is now outdated."