By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.Com
June 15, 2008
Under pressure from consumer activists and threatened by legislation from Congress, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced plans to further refine the means by which it collects data on broadband Internet availability across the country.
But the FCC also released another report claiming that broadband was being deployed sufficiently to all Americans, relying on the very same flawed data. Critics say the agency's sluggish response has slowed economic development in huge swaths of the country.
The new system will require Internet service providers (ISPs) to report data to the FCC on both residential and business subscribers based on census reports, to better target availability of high-speed Internet services to consumers. Under the FCC's previous measuring system, if one subscriber in a given region has access to broadband, the entire region was considered to be covered.
The FCC's broadband data collection practices have been a point of criticism for the agency for several years, relying as they did on a speed standard of 200 kilobits per second (kbps), which most broadband cable, DSL, and satellite connections easily surpass.
Under the new system, the agency will be measuring speed according to five tiers, with the first tier extending from 200 kbps to 768 kbps, the average speed of a slow DSL connection. Higher tiers for consumer reporting will go from 1.5 mbps to 6.0 mbps for both upload and download speeds.
"We find that requiring providers to report data in more detailed speed tiers will better identify services that support advanced applications, creating distinctions that reflect different capacities for transmitting high quality video and similar high bandwidth communications," the agency said in its report. "Armed with this additional broadband data, the Commission will be better able to assess and promote the deployment of broadband across the nation," said FCC chairman Kevin Martin.
Fellow commissioner Michael Copps lamented how the lack of data on broadband availability has impeded the ability of businesses to invest in new technologies that require high-speed Internet access, such as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services.
"I wonder how much investment our failure to develop high-quality broadband statistics has prevented. We will never know," Copps said. "The good news is that [today's order] shows we're finally getting serious about broadband data-gathering."
Same Old, Same Old
The broadband data collection issue was a hot button in technology circles, as it symbolized what some viewed as the FCC's and the Bush administration's lack of commitment to a nationwide broadband policy. In 2007, the Senate had introduced legislation designed to improve the FCC's data collection procedures, but it failed to gain much traction.
The FCC finally publicly admitted that its data collection practices needed improvement in March 2008, but have continued to release regular reports claiming that broadband availability is sufficient, using the old data. The most recent "706 Report" was released alongside the new broadband data collection order, prompting Martin to tout the increase in broadband Internet subscribers during his tenure.
"Since I joined the Commission, [broadband Internet] lines have grown 950% from just over 9 million lines to over 100 million lines," Martin said. "Our analysis indicates that more than 99% of the country's population lives in the more than 99% of ZIP codes where a provider reports having at least one high-speed service subscriber."
Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein dissented, stating that "this report...fails to set out an adequate basis for concluding that broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely basis to all Americans, which is our directive under the statute. Instead, this report repeats past shortcomings, relies on faulty data, and fails to present a clear picture of broadband in America."
