North Carolina looks to challenge FCC over broadband coverage

North Carolina officials are streamlining a self-reporting tool that allows residents to document their internet speed, in hopes of mounting a challenge against the Federal Communication Commission’s broadband coverage map data. Jeff Sural, director of the NC Department of Technology’s broadband infrastructure office, said the goal is to get federal broadband expansion funding for the parts of his state that remain unserved. Sural and his team are partnering with the Measurement Lab, or M-Lab, an open-source team of international researchers and industry and public-interest partners that specialize in broadband policy and geographic-information-system visualization and telecommunications technologies. “So far, one thing we have gleaned from our crowdsourcing tool is that there are a number of locations in areas where the FCC says there is [download coverage of 25 megabits per second and an upload rate of 3 Mbps] that are not getting those speeds,” Sural said. M-Lab’s tests will also consider whether a user is contracted to receive high-speed broadband in the first place. That could reveal whether a user is underserved and could raise a case against the FCC’s coverage data. If not, Sural said he’d like to know that too. “What we’d like to do is find out more about pricing and really focus on going after and identifying the unserved areas so we can report that to the FCC to make sure that we’re getting our fair share of funding to all of those areas,” he said.