This week, Free Press published Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road, a documentary series that profiled families and individuals struggling without high-speed Internet access in rural North Carolina. We heard it straight from them: Broadband is simply not available. Yet the Federal Communications Commission says these people live in areas with several broadband providers. What’s going on?

It’s been clear for some time that the FCC’s method of mapping broadband coverage – who in America has it, and who doesn’t – is woefully inadequate. The FCC uses a ZIP Code methodology for mapping broadband, designating an area as broadband covered if a single address in the ZIP Code has service.

Because of the obvious shortcomings of this method, it is difficult to get an accurate picture of the current state of broadband deployment in the United States. But now we have these self-reported experiences to compare with the FCC’s own data that overstates the level of broadband deployment. And it looks like “overstating” is an understatement.

Let’s compare:

Jay Foushee and his family are stuck on dial-up in rural Roxboro: “I have called our local phone companies numerous times asking, ‘When can we get [high-speed Internet]?’ I keep getting, ‘Well, it’s coming, it’s coming.’ And this has been going on for about three years now.”

The FCC says there are eight providers in Jay’s area.

Layten Davis says only dial-up is available in Spring Creek: “We can’t turn the switch on to get the [broadband] turned on.”

The FCC says there are six providers in Layten’s Zip code.

Sam Adams had to erect his own wireless tower to get high-speed Internet in Rutherfordton: “Moving out here was digital culture shock in a way,” Sam says. “I assumed wrongly that I would at least be able to get cable out to the house, or DSL. As it turned out, neither of those are even close to where we live, and even our regular phone line, when it rains out here and the ground gets good and wet, our phones crackle and sometimes go out.”

The FCC says there are five providers in Rutherfordton.

Martha Abraham had to subscribe to expensive and unreliable satellite service in Mars Hill because broadband isn’t an option: “On some days, [satellite] is not any better than dial-up, and you don’t know when it’s going to be working and when it’s not. Rainstorms, it’s down. Snow, it’s down. Wind, it’s down.’”

    The FCC says there are six providers in Martha’s area.

The FCC has finally acknowledged its poor reporting skills, and will start collecting more reliable broadband data in two weeks using a new method. They’ve ditched the discredited ZIP code system in favor of actually counting the number of subscribers in each Census tract, broken down by technology and speed tier.  This new approach will help solve the problem of overstating the level of competition where service is available, but still doesn’t address the problem of identifying the granular locations where broadband has yet to be deployed (the FCC has promised to deal with the availability issue very soon).

But the new subscribership data should be far more informative than the old ZIP Code data. Let’s hope it is, because judging by these real world examples, the commission has much to change.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->