Phoenix Center Releases Study Assessing the Accuracy of FCC Form 477 Broadband Availability Data

In a new analysis entitled A Quality Check on Form 477 Data: Errors, Subsidies, and Econometrics, Phoenix Center Chief Economist Dr. George Ford compares Federal Communications Commission Form 477 data to the State of Georgia's broadband availability survey data to make several interesting findings:

1. Dr. Ford finds that the availability rate from Form 477 is highly correlated with actual availability, yet at the Census Block level the Form 477 Data can mislead policymakers about availability.
2. The errors in the Form 477 Data might be expected to be related to the size of the Census Block.  In small urban blocks, the one-served-all-served nature of the Form 477 data presumably leads to small errors, while in larger rural blocks the errors may be large.
3. About 9.1 million locations are without broadband at the 25 Mbps up/3 Mbps down level, once accounting for the roughly 5 million locations addressed by the recent Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction.
4. According to Dr. Ford’s calculations, if the average subsidy is $2,000 (the average of the RDOF auction), then the additional subsidy required to reach unserved households is $18.2 billion.  If the average subsidy level is $3,000, then $22.8 billion is needed.  And at a very high average subsidy of $5,000, getting broadband to every location requires approximately $45.5 billion.