The 2020 Census provides a new source of "ground truth" for unserved locations

One can assess the population that is unserved by broadband, the residential housing units unserved by broadband, or with the new Federal Communication Commission maps, “broadband serviceable locations.” My analyses are based on census block-level housing unit projections for 2019 (based on the 2010 Census), published by the FCC. In April 2021, the Census published the 2020 decennial block-level housing unit counts, which updates the “ground truth,” and it’s worth examining how these numbers change the “Digital Divide”. However, when we looked at housing units unserved by broadband according to the June 2021 FCC Form 477 data, there are 19% fewer unserved housing units. To be clear, nothing changed because of inefficient mapping techniques from the FCC. The reason is that the datasets used by the FCC between the 2010 Census and the 2020 Census were not interchangeable. What’s likely happening is the same problem that beset Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF): in an effort to update projections for county-level population growth since 2010, somehow Census blocks that shouldn’t have population were given population. The 2020 Census corrects that back to zero. Considering how different the new FCC “broadband serviceable locations” maps will be from the existing Form 477 block-level data, and the grumbling about the maps which has already begun, the FCC and CostQuest need “ground truth” to compare against. It won’t work if there’s nothing to compare a “broadband serviceable location” against, and it won’t work if the comparison is apples-to-oranges. What will work, in my view, is a comparison of residential broadband serviceable locations as identified by the FCC and CostQuest against the 2020 Census housing unit counts.