In states, concerns with fairness of FCC's rural broadband fund

Amid widely conflicting reports of how many Americans truly lack access to high-speed internet, state broadband officials said that there’s too much funding at stake to rely on the Federal Communications Commission’s unreliable census-block data. In some cases, officials speaking at an event hosted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, said they have even taken the mapping effort into their own hands. The FCC announced last month that the first $16 billion of its $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund will be distributed based on the agency’s “Form 477” data, which divides coverage areas by census blocks and counts an entire block as “served” if just one address in the block has broadband, vastly overstating the coverage areas of internet service providers. Despite the FCC’s claims that the first round of funding would only go to “wholly unserved” areas, state officials said they were not confident in the program. When the FCC begins distributing the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, however, it may not matter how accurate statewide coverage maps are. FCC Chairman and former Verizon lobbyist Ajit Pai added a rule that would make any area of the country that already receives money from a federal or state-funded broadband expansion program ineligible for the fund, potentially ruling out rural parts of more than 30 states.