U.S. Broadband Maps, Called Generally Good, Still Lack Pricing, Irritating Some

That broadband maps will be used for the second tranche of USF Connect America Fund money, following $300 million in the first CAF phase, means all stakeholders have an interest in accuracy, said Connected Nation Chief Policy Counsel Tom Koutsky in an interview. “We all have an interest in making sure this map is as accurate” and “verified as possible,” said Koutsky, whose nonprofit has grants and contracts with nine states and Puerto Rico to gather broadband availability data that the states send to NTIA. The map will determine whether a company can use CAF money to support broadband deployment in an area, to show whether the area’s not served or the extent it is at the time of Internet service buildout, said Koutsky.

The NTIA and FCC are separately collecting data for the first half of this year, said officials at both agencies. They said the commission collects it through Form 477 that’s required of some providers, while NTIA gets it through states that solicit it voluntarily or independently if ISPs can’t or won’t provide it. States provide and verify broadband availability information, and can find “other sources of data” if needed absent what ISPs give them, said NTIA State Broadband Initiative Director Anne Neville. “That is why we have a very complete data set."

Worries about the data include that there’s no national repository of pricing information, because the government is gathering information on speed and location and not cost of broadband, said New America Foundation (NAF) officials in an interview and on the panel sponsored by a new group called DC Legal Hackers (http://bit.ly/1cHuPzB) that was promoted by some FCBA Privacy and Data Security Committee members. NTIA “focused on the question of availability, because that’s what the legislation gave us authority to focus on,” said Neville at the event. NTIA awarded about $200 million to fund state efforts to collect data over five years, money set aside by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that helped meet what was set out but not funded in the Broadband Data Improvement Act, she noted.

Differences between what the FCC and NTIA collect means only availability is shown by area in the national maps organized by NTIA, not the extent to which broadband is purchased, while Form 477 has information on subscribers, said Senior Field Analyst Greta Byrum of NAF’s Open Technology Institute at the event. OTI has found “very, very low adoption” in areas of big cities that are outside the downtown and central business areas, which she described as having seen “white flight” in the 1970s. “This kind of data is one of the most stark places you can look on issues of equity,” said Byrum. “People don’t necessarily know that it’s there and know that they can look at these maps and really see a portrait of access to opportunity.”

It’s a major problem for OTI that Form 477 lacks pricing data, said Byrum in a follow-up interview. That “makes it virtually impossible to understand the state of competition and the way that subscription corresponds to price,” she said. “That’s a lost opportunity for consumers and also for anybody purchasing broadband services.” ISPs didn’t want to disclose what they charge consumers in providing data on subscriber-by-area and broadband speed, and the revisions to Form 477 the FCC adopted in June didn’t mandate prices be filed, said Byrum. With no federal entity collecting pricing data, it’s “impossible for us to understand how price affects adoption and how competition affects the market,” she said. A plus for Form 477 over the state-collected and NTIA-compiled data is that the form differentiates between residential and commercial-customer providers, while NTIA doesn’t, said Byrum.

There are also concerns that data collection isn’t specific enough geographically, said

OTI Policy Program Associate Patrick Lucey and Koutsky in separate interviews. In rural areas with large census blocks, a standard of measurement, there are concerns Form 477 will have less information than states now provide, said Koutsky of Connected Nation, the largest provider of broadband mapping data to NTIA. “There will be a loss of some granularity, particularly in large, rural census blocks.” For rural areas relying on mobile broadband for Internet service, the question is whether that makes the data less useful, he said. “I hope not.”

NTIA’s second-to-last data collection round is for information as of Dec. 31, 2013, that’s due from states April 1 and will be released a few months later, said Neville in an interview. The last round is for data as of this June 30, due Oct. 1 and will be released in January or February 2015, she said. “After that, updates to the map, and ownership of the maps, will be over at the FCC.” Filing of the data at the FCC is expected to begin in September, covering the first half of this year, said a commission news release issued as the agency voted in June to make changes to Form 477 (http://fcc.us/KKY0IU). “We are committed to improving the data that the Commission collects even as we continue to explore ways to make the Form 477 filing less burdensome,” said the order (http://fcc.us/1lYjo8C).

The commission is “moving apace” to collect data that’s current as of June 30, said Steven Rosenberg, chief Wireline Bureau data officer. “We're not there yet, but that’s still our plan.” NTIA now “collects data at the sub-block level for Census blocks that are greater than 2 square miles,” he noted. “The commission voted to collect data only at the block level, not to collect those sub-block data, and cited in the order the concerns of the value of such data relative to” the difficulty of providing it, said Rosenberg.

The broadband maps were ahead of their time when they first went live, though two-plus years on, some aspects are dated, said Mike Byrne, FCC geographic information officer, at the high-technology event. “We did all the things that young startups are doing today,” with the idea that “if we build it in a scalable way, people will consume it,” he said of research and development efforts that included modeling about 20 different personas of map users. The information is being used for economic development, said government speakers including Senior Project Manager Virginia Maloney of New York City’s quasi-governmental Economic Development Corp. (EDC). Real-estate websites like Trulia and Zillow may have interest in the maps, said Byrne. “You would think that both of these guys would like to have plastered all over the site” something akin to a “broadband score” by location, he said, also saying such information could be relevant for Yelp-like reviews.

EDC sees potential for crowdsourcing of data, with customers requesting service or other enhancements, said Maloney. Many ISPs aren’t eager “to give out their customer lists to EDC,” she said. “We envision this growing into more of a tool, rather than just an information source,” for ISPs to “directly” contact those who comment, she said. NTIA did a “reasonably good job” with its map, and the FCC has done a good job in the past of protecting the confidentiality of Form 477 data, said Glenn Reynolds, USTelecom vice president-policy. NCTA declined to comment.