NCTA to FCC: Broadband Data Collection Effort Should Be Confined to Deployment

Cable operators are telling the Federal Communications Commission to use its new broadband deployment data regime for just that, collecting deployment data, rather than use it as a vehicle for collecting data on latency or price, as some have argued it should do. The NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the FCC that it should reject proposals to expand the data collection, which could delay the goal of getting to better broadband availability maps. NCTA said data on latency (how fast data gets from the source to the destination) was not a measure of deployment and the "burden" of adding that would "far exceed" any benefit from the added, unrelated, data. In any event, NCTA said, "Imposing a latency reporting obligation is particularly unwarranted with respect to fixed wireline broadband providers because there is no evidence of latency problems associated with these services." NCTA said that given the "breadth" of info already available per other FCC transparency rules, and other means (the Measuring Broadband America program for example), it would be a new burden without "meaningful" benefit. Plus, said NCTA, broadband is usually part of a bundle and frequently subject to promotional pricing. So "customers purchasing a given tier of broadband services from the same provider may be paying a range of rates."