After years of pushback from the telecom industry to make the FCC’s broadband coverage maps more accurate, now several associations and companies have banded together to design better maps with more accurate coverage data. The group, including USTelecom, Wireless Internet Providers Association, AT&T, Verizon, and others, announced trial projects in Virginia and Missouri, Inside Towers reported last week.
However, critics question why the effort is happening now, and ask if the real goal is less broadband location accuracy, reports Motherboard.
Large ISPs have an interest in glossing over the lack of industry competition in some areas, according to the account.
“We have proposed to Congress and regulatory agencies, a method to create a public-private partnership to map America’s broadband infrastructure so policymakers and providers can better target scarce funding to communities with limited or no service options,” USTelecom and the other groups said in last week’s announcement. They said they’ll work together to increase the granularity of the FCC’s broadband maps, which are key to determining where scarce federal dollars to support broadband deployment should go.
However, in 2017, USTelecom opposed efforts to map broadband on a more accurate level, telling the FCC that would be too burdensome. Asked why the turnabout now, the association told Motherboard, the group opposed past agency mapping reform efforts because they, “were not necessarily helpful to moving the needle on a mapping solution.”
“Instead, USTelecom believes the better approach would be to develop a complete map of serviceable locations and then ask carriers to identify which of those locations they serve in a more granular fashion,” the organization said in a statement.
“I think we should be extremely skeptical of taking ideas from an industry that has chosen to avoid competing with cable companies as the arbiter of accurate mapping that will measure the state of competition and access,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Ernesto Falcon told Motherboard. “They have every interest in hiding the ball of how badly the United States is behind on fiber to the home deployment as they are generally seen as the companies that should be leading that effort.”
Consumer groups like Free Press have been lobbying for better, more transparent broadband mapping data for two decades. Organization Research Director Derek Turner told Motherboard that while the group supports broadband mapping reform, it’s concerned USTelecom’s interest is in making it harder to independently verify the data.
At the announcement, USTelecom President/CEO Jonathan Spalter said the group’s work will be submitted to the FCC with hopes the agency would adopt it on a national basis. If so, that will determine data availability, according to group members.
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March 27, 2019
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