Data & Mapping

Sen Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel encouraged Lewis County High School students to submit broadband speed tests while they are learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Frontier Communications claimed that it now offers broadband in 17,000 rural census blocks in an effort to remove those areas from the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming rural broadband funding program, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance filed comments with the FCC to draw attention to Frontier’s questionable claims. “We are concerned that Frontier may have overstated its capacity to actually deliver the claimed services in many areas,” the comments read.

Efforts from the Federal Communications Commission to expand both fixed-wireless and mobile broadband across rural America will require more granular data to reach their full potential, but deployment efforts shouldn’t be delayed any longer, according to industry stakeholders and legislators testifying at a Senate hearing. The FCC has acknowledged that its data-collection processes are fundamentally flawed as carriers have overstated coverage in their self-reported map data.

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught the technology and communications policy world anything, it is that policymakers have utterly failed to meet the mission of the National Broadband Plan. Although the National Broadband Plan provided a road map and initially tracked progress, we have seen a relatively nonpartisan tech policy space abandon consensus views on the technicalities of the network and the importance of universal service principles.

In October 2019, the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI), launching its annual review to determine if broadband is reaching all Americans in a timely fashion. Back then, we examined the questions the FCC was asking and how they might color its decision.

A Q&A with New York Times technology reporter Cecilia Kang. 

The Federal Communication Commission released its annual Broadband Deployment report for 2020. It notes the narrowest digital divide to date as more than 85 percent of Americans have a fixed terrestrial broadband service at 250/25 Mbps, a 47% increase since 2017 with many of the biggest gains in rural areas. However, the two Democrat Commissioners rejected the report, saying the data was fundamentally flawed, that as many as 162 million people lack broadband (half the population of the USA!). What’s going on? Here are six sleights of hand used in the debate:

To put it bluntly, our internet is breaking. And it’s not breaking equitably. During the last half of February 2020, our research shows that 1,708 counties (52.8 percent) in the U.S. had median download speeds that did not meet the Federal Communication Commission’s minimum criteria to qualify as “broadband” connectivity. By the last two weeks of March 2020 (following widespread shelter-in-place orders across the U.S.), we found that the number of counties that did not meet the FCC’s minimum criteria for broadband speed had increased to 2,012 (62.2 percent).

Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), co-chair of the Senate Broadband Caucus, said that the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) 2020 Broadband Deployment Report shows progress has been made in better connecting communities across the country. However, the report is based off of flawed data. "[T]his report is not perfect, and I appreciate the FCC’s recognition that more granular data is needed," she said. "The report is a positive news that the digital divide continues to close and that we continue to make progress.

On April 24, the Federal Communications Commission released the nation's 2020 Broadband Progress Report. It concludes that broadband is being delivered to all Americans in a reasonable and timely way. But from where I sit, nothing could be further from the truth. I refused to offer my support for the 2020 Broadband Progress Report. That's because, in this crisis, it has become painfully clear that not everyone in the US has adequate Internet access. The evidence is all around us. We need to set broadband baseline standard to 100 megabits per second.