AT&T, T-Mobile fight FCC plan to test whether they lie about cell coverage

AT&T and T-Mobile are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to require drive tests that would verify whether the mobile carriers' coverage claims are accurate. The carriers' objections came in response to the FCC seeking comment on a plan to improve the nation's inadequate broadband maps. Besides submitting more accurate coverage maps, the FCC plan would require carriers to do a statistically significant amount of drive testing. This could prevent repeats of cases in which carriers exaggerated their coverage in FCC filings, which can result in government broadband funding not going to the areas where it is needed most. Small carriers that compete against the big three in rural areas previously had to conduct drive tests at their own expense in order to prove that the large carriers didn't serve the areas they claimed to serve.

AT&T objected to the proposed drive-testing requirement in a filing to the FCC, saying that annual "drive testing is not the proper solution for verifying nationwide coverage maps" and that there is "potential difficulty in determining how to formulate a statistically valid sample for areas given the terrain variability nationwide."