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FCC Admits Mistakes In Measuring Broadband Competition
techdirtfeed writes "For years, plenty of folks (including the Government Accountability Office) have been pointing out that the way the FCC measures broadband competition is very flawed. It simply assumes that if a single household in a zip code is offered broadband by provider A, then every household in that zip code can get broadband from provider A. See the problem? For some reason the FCC still hasn't changed its ways, but at least they're starting to realize the problem. They're now saying they need to change the way they measure competition. Commissioner Michael Copps points out: 'Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price.'"
I'm sure that in other places they count it the same way... or perhaps even worse.
So, that would make them the most naive member of the FCC they had? or is she just good at acting surprised...
I look forward to the restructuring of the FCC after this where they purge the evil and the misguided statistics....because i'm absolutely sure that will happen.
and no, i'm definitely not being sarcastic. at all.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Switch to Area Code
If they handle broadband internet monopolies like they do Microsoft it won't matter if their methods are flawed.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
To answer your question, your agency does suck donkey balls...
In my parents postal code (in scotland) there are 11 homes, the exchange is less than a thousand feet from any of them so they all qualify for roughly the same speed of DSL.
My zip code in colorado probably has several thousand homes. I have three broadband options (DSL, Cable, Wireless) but I wouldn't be surprised to know there were people in my zip who couldn't get any.
If the FCC switched to using ZIP+4 then it would probably be a much more accurate and comparable method.
There should be a service provider olympics. Winner is the one who does best in most events, subject to drug testing.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The FCC should definitely be restructured and be given a refresher course of its mission... it was originally created to govern communication frequency allocation, and that's where it should stay. It should not be acting like an unofficial censorship bureau and/or advocate to the MPAA; it should be neutral on those issues.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
but why do they even measure these things at all?
I'm not trying to troll. I just don't see the point.
Developers: We can use your help.
'Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price.'
This is terrible news. Now how will our children download ever-greater quantities of media?
Meanwhile, in Iraq: *BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM*
Until recently 26.4 K dial-up was all that was available where I live. Neither broadband cable or DSL was available and even 56K dial-up was not available (just 26.4K). Then a few months ago DSL finally became available and I now can download at 1.5 MBs and upload at about 800 K. The 26.4K was such a pain when I was taking several college classes that had lots of graphics intensive online study material. Security updates for Windows and Linux sometimes took hours to download.
I live in a small city in Arizona, but am not in a rural area. Most people in my Zip code did have cable and in some also had DSL available, but not where I live.
In the world (or something like that), it seems that doing a statistically random poll is a more accurate representation than the way the FCC does it anyway. Why do Zonk, kdawson, and the rest of the mental midgets at Slashdot obsess about this issue anyway? It's not as if broadband penetration means much of anything, if those who want to use it can use it at work anyway.
Your friendly local city government gets to decide whether competing cable companies are allowed to operate in your area, and gets to dictate the terms under which they can do business. Fortunately, the regulations you lot support will quickly enough ensure that there are no new entrants to an over-regulated market, thus rendering that power moot.
the only way their previous formula would hold true is if everybody in the zip code created a huge wireless network off the first customer's broadband wireless router. obviously not plausible as then everybody's connection wouldn't be at or above the 200 kb/s required to call it broadband.
i wonder if the percentage of usage that is deemed fraudulent (next door neighbor stealing your internet) will factor into any new formulas they come out with?
-Tony
Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price.'"
So? Does anyone outside Evil Marketing Overlords who want to push broadband paid content even care?
Besides, I have 15 Mbps fiber at my house. Who cares what anyone else has. :)
I'm from a medium-to-large sized agricultural city in California. While people within the city limits can get broadband fairly easily, it took several years of prodding to even get a technician/installer out to my parent's house. Their house, in the county, is about 50-60 feet off the street. They finally got a guy to come out, but the service is absolutely horrible. Someone mentioned doing it by area codes I think. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but here area codes cover a larger area than zip codes. Then you'd have worse problems trying to get an accurate sampling.
New Mexico still only has one, 505(they have said we would get 575 or something, but i don't know of anyone who has one, yet).
Once we clear the issue of broadband providers up, can we move on to cell phones? The US market is even further behind the rest of the world there.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm always amazed at just how much broadband costs in the U.S. No wonder the FCC thinks nobody wants it!
I get ADSL from the phone company for $CDN 34.95 a month. They sent me a new DSL modem that's supposed to go twice as fast (the usual residential ADSL offering is 1.5 MBPS), but I haven't found any sites with big enough pipes to see the difference. I'm close enough to the central office to go a lot faster if I wanted to pay for it.
I have family who live out in the country. Until recently they suffered through 56k dialup that rarely connected above 28.8. Now they have satellite broadband, and pay about what I do, per person (my Mum and my sister share a connection).
...laura, well-connected Canadian Linux and Mac user
What kind of crony does this Michael Copps think he is if he readily admits governmental mistakes. He should look to Roberto Gonzales for direction in how to be an unquestioning lap dog.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I blame RIAA, it members, MPAA, Disney as much for the collapse of WorldCom (all that *dark* fiber) and the re-emergence of the "baby" Bells and the other roads hogs. Some baby Bells, etc made state level agreements ~10 years ago that should have put them more on track for capacity and last mile if they had not reneged on the provisions of such agreements.
Yes, like Clinton, the third George's reign has helped make the world, er, country safe for our brand of state capitalism.
Our country is falling behind.. because of government sponsored telecom companies and the monopolies they are allowed to create.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Area codes can be huge. The whole of NZ South Island is one area code.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Our kids are falling behind in math. Well, what do you expect if there is such low broadband? Lets start "No kid left on dial up"!
If US had huge broadband uptake, it would be bandied about to show that current policies are working.
The facts are unimportant. They are just anchors for the spin.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
a Bush Appointee, does that tell you anything?
Post offices are build in population centers. The zip codes correspond to presorting for post office and route within it. They tend to be organized as one of the following:
1) A patch with a post office (in the local town or village) at the center.
2) A set of pie wedges centered on a post office.
3) A set of patches surrounded by a set of pie wedges.
So zip codes that include the under-served rural areas will almost invariably have a point, near the post office, in a city, town, village, or otherwise the most dense local population.
Thus the rural houses that are not served by broadband will generally still be counted as "served" unless the town where the associated post-office is located doesn't have broadband either. (Even then they may be counted as "served" if, say, the edge of the zip code is within range of a nearby city's phone system or WiMax tower.)
(I wonder if 89444 (Wellington NV - including Topaz Ranch Estates and parts of Antelope Valley, which are over a mountain pass from it) is counted as served, due to a house or two near the edge of their delivery area being within range of one of the two Clearwire towers in Gardnerville, or able to catch a bounce off the side of a mountain or a shot down a slot between two peaks? I know that my place out that way can only get dialup - and rarely connects at over 28k due to seven miles or so of line to the nearest T1 line bank.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...Copps is a Democratic commissioner in a Republican administration. Which means there's very little he can do about it (although his position has improved considerably after the midterm elections). Copps has been railing about this problem for years. The news in this story is that Kevin Martin, the Republican FCC chairman, finally admitted that the data the FCC has been collecting is worthless.
I look forward to the restructuring of the FCC after this where they purge the evil and the misguided statistics....because i'm absolutely sure that will happen.
It will happen, but you may have to wait until early 2009...
Cable access is pretty simple. Either the provider offers it or they do not. For the most part, it is system-wide today and not a lot of areas have cable but no Internet connectivity through it.
DSL is not so simple. You need an unbroken copper pair from the CO to the house. Most newer subdivisions in Illinois use a fiber connection to a vault and then copper from the vault to the houses. There is no room in the vault for a DSLAM, so no DSL. Especially there is no room in the vault for multiple DSLAM's so there could be at most one or two providers. This was a clear violation of the rules a few years back and the only way out was "No DSLAM period." So that is how it works in newer areas.
Older areas are generally copper to the CO without any interruptions but you do have the maximum distance limit. Many homes have fine telephone service out past 17,000 feet from the CO - no DSL for them. Past around 12,000 you aren't going to get much beyond 512K anyway, at least without quite a bit of searching for a good pair.
So cable is simple and DSL is complicated. To determine if a given address can get DSL you need to know both the distance to the CO, the facilities in the CO and the type of connectivity to the house. This is not easy outside of major metropolitan areas.
ZIP code is about as close as you could get for an approximation. Anything else would be either block-by-block or individual homes. Maybe they could get this information into the 2010 census because that would be about the only practical way to collect the volume of information that would be needed.
but why do they even measure these things at all?
Have we all forgotten the debate over opening access to the local loop to competition for DSL service? This was supposed to be one of the premises of the 1996 Telecom Act. The FCC initially implemented this, unbundling DSL service, allowing CLEC's to compete over the incumbents' phone lines. But the incumbents fought tooth and nail in the courts and found a receptive audience in certain anti-regulatory judges on the D.C. Circuit Federal Appeals Court. The FCC repeatedly had to redraft the rules, and the whole thing dragged out until the Bush administration came in at which point the FCC just gave up on unbundling the local loop, claiming that there was plenty of competition in the broadband internet market and there was no need for the FCC to mandate line sharing. This was, of course, bullshit. Few people in the US have more than two real options for broadband (and many would count themselves lucky to have two). The zip code data collection system grossly inflates the number of broadband options available, providing a misleading picture of the state of broadband competition in the US. If they actually collected accurate data on competition it would quickly become apparent how badly misguided the decision to abandon unbundling was. And so there has been a pitched battle over data collection between Commissioner Copps (who supported unbundling and wants accurate data) and Chairman Martin (who is happy the crappy zip code system). It looks like Copps has gotten the upper hand...
US broadband speeds, directional balance, and legal definitions have been dumbed down to serve the interests of the incumbent telecom and cable providers and the entertainment industry.
DSL and cable's directionally unbalanced bandwidths are legacy broadband and are technologically obsolescent. Real broadband is bi-directional and starts at about 1 GB to the home. That's what fiber is capable of providing and is what other countries are getting or building toward. A 1 GB fiber can provide telephone, Internet, and cable TV on a single connection, and should cost no more than about $50 a month for all three combined.
In such a system, any subscriber can become a content originator. To prevent discrimination, providers of content, applications, snd services should be legally separated from providers of bandwidth.
This dumbing down has a serious negative impact on US competitiveness. Innovators with real broadband can conceive of applications that US innovators wouldn't imagine because of dumbed-down broadband.
Congress and the FCC still think that broadband starts at 200 KB and that broadband is reasonably provided as a means of delivering proprietary content. They need to get up to date.
FCC Admits Mistakes In Measuring Broadband Competition
But I wish they'd admit to some more of their mistakes, and then do something about them. This one isn't even one of the most damning.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I was on a chat site where someone frome SE Asia made a comment about the internet service they had: 100Mb Ethernet! For 5 years, I paid $50/month for 5Mb download and 384kb upload (aside from an occasional discount when moving)! After 5 years, I finally got moved up to 7Mb download and 512kb upload, and for another $10/month I can upgrade to 10Mb download and unknown upload. Woo Hoo :(. I'm sure they do bandwidth throttling on some sites because it's not unusual for me to have trouble streaming videos from Google or YouTube, and it was a huge mess when they upped the speed around Christmas. (anyone offer any input on that?)
...goes looking for better access...Roadrunner Business Class *DOH!!* :(
In the same amount of time, Ethernet has gone from being able to get an 8-port 100Mb switch for ~$100 (don't remember for sure what I paid) to getting a 5-port for $16 or 8-port for $40. I wish the FCC would get their facts straight about broadband, so they could know how much the US offerings suck!
Why should my ISP be able to throttle and charge websites for me using MY bandwidth anyway? I've already bought it from them. It's my bandwidth! I paid for it! I have the bills to prove it's mine! Since we're a free country with a free market, I'll just cancel my Time Warner Roadrunner service and go to the competition, Time Warner's Roadrunner Turbocharged! *sigh*
I don't actually know a thing about it, but given the processes and 'inputs' that go into these things, it probably was, in fact, calculated to do just that: paint a rosy picture.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
"Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price."
Seems almost? Hello! This would be funny if it were not so painful. If the American people ever manage to wrestle control of their nation from the corporate oligarchy this last decade may very well be recorded in history as the most corrupt since the days of the railroad barons. If we cannot manage reclamation of control such things are going to get a whole lot worse before they break. A disaster which is an inevitable end in a nation where a minority groups greed and corruption run reckless over the will and common interests of the majority of the populace.
Over the years I have heard several people quote some old Scottish monarchist, whose name I forget just now, who rattled on about how democracies were predestined to fail due to the ability of the people to vote themselves endless benefits with no responsibilities. Oh for want of a rope...sorry, back on topic. This I guess could be true in a straight up democracy, however we in the USA are supposed to be living in a representative republic which is designed to negate such excesses. Somehow the Republic has been damaged or at least it's principles have been subverted by those at the top of the economic and political food chain. What is really appalling is that many of these entities are not even real persons, in fact not even Americans. What is so ironic is that the failure of this nation might very well happen through the lack of honest democratic process. Had enough yet folks? I would really like to see this corrected via pressure on our representatives before it get so bad that worse methods are employed by very angry people.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
in particular and ob/gyn, a baby and mommy doctor. As opposed to a lot of congress weasels who were/are lawyers and marketing and management type schmmoozers.
He has delivered thousands of babies. He knows first hand that's a baby being killed in an abortion, despite the culturally suicidal-bent genocidalists who keep insisting it is just useless fetal tissue. I imagine that is why he has that opinion on the subject, he actually deals with it.
As to your other points, he fits the bill perfectly, and as an added bonus, he is for sound money (and dumping that damn useless parasite horde known as the Fed and bringing back just normal real lawful US money with no interest or strings attached) and non interventionist foreign policy. He is probably the strictest constitutionalist in congress and most likely the most honest as well. He stands for all "your" rights, all the time, in all the situations-including babies. It is a fairly consistent platform really.
Myself I am an old timey paleocon type, looking for the same sort of party, and near as I can see, ron paul comes to the closest to what the R party really should be. Most of the other R bozos are neocon traitorous globalists (there are a few exceptions, very few, mostly only at lower level grassroots levels), and as such I never vote R (nor D, third party or independent only), but I'll vote Ron Paul this time even if I have to write him in.
Really, do some research on him, find some audio interviews, see if you can see any of his testimony on the house floor, etc, listen to the man, you'll see, he's a pretty straight shooter as politicians go.
Politics is usually too complex to be a single issue voter-because you can't clone yourself and vote for yourself in every race. You have to pick the person who covers most of your bases for you-and you'll never get 100%, just isn't going to happen, any party or any candidate in any race.
Oh, phleeze! Is it actually a requirement to be an idiot to work for the FCC.
I'm one of those guys who can't get wired broadband, and I'll betcha they have me listed as "served" (it's ok, I have satellite, for about $100/month, that's delivers reasonable performance, unless latency is your big thing). I live in rural South Jersey, in a town covering about 45 square miles that's apparently too small to have its own zipcode. So we get to use a bunch of zipcodes from other towns... that's how zipcodes work, after all... they just link your house to the post office serving that house.
So you can get DSL in some areas of this zipcode, and cable in others... but the zipcode is for Monroeville, NJ. Monroeville is about 15 houses and a post office... most of the people in the Monroeville zipcode don't actually live in Monroeville. In fact, that zipcode covers part of two different counties. MOST of the people in the Monroeville zipcode probably can't get either form of wired broadband offered in this area, but we're no-doubt counted, because the zipcode covers a huge area.
Someone, I shoulda seen this one coming...
-Dave Haynie
Not only is their methodology on zip codes flawed but their whole definition of what is "high speed" is way off. The FCC needs to update its definition. The minimum high speed should be is 2 MPPS upstream and 1 MBPS downstream. For other countries that would still be slow but we need to start somewhere. Even when we pay for higher speeds there is no consumer protection that requires providers to give you what you pay for. The only way for these issues to be addressed is a serious public policy encouraging real high speed broadband, affordable for every American. It is not going to happen by itself. Other countries (like Japan) have 100 MBPS for the same as we are paying. We need to take steps now. There is some good information on the state of American broadband and proposals for change on http://www.speedmatters.org./
You have *not* paid for that bandwidth. It is a "best effort" type of bandwidth you pay for, and it is oversold. It has to be. If you are paying less than three figures for 5Mbps then you are not paying for dedicated bandwidth, plain and simple.
...Steve
I live in Kansas City and I've moved around the metropolitan area about 5 times in the last 8 years. Some areas of the city must have some sort of exclusivity contracts since there's only one cable provider. Not coincidentally, these are the areas with the higher prices and unforgivably hideous customer service. I'd like to see some investigation into why cable providers are allowed to stake out exclusive territories in an otherwise homogenous metropolitan region.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You can buy, either from the Post Office or from numerous other information retailers, huge databases that cross-reference street addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4s.
The information is built in to many other programs, too; if you type a street address into Google Maps, for instance, it will pop out the address in USPS standard format, which includes the ZIP+4. I assume that you could run the information in the reverse direction too, if you had access to the database. (There's no way on Google Maps to type in a ZIP+4 and get all the street addresses there, but it would be trivial to do if you had the data available.)
At the local levels, I'm sure that the Post Office probably has maps that show exactly where the ZIP and ZIP+4s fall "on the ground," I can personally attest to having seen the ZIP ones, but I don't know about maps of the +4 extensions (it might be that they're so granular that they don't bother to map them, the sorting systems and human letter carriers just know how they're associated to addresses).
The address lists that you can purchase for the purposes of sending out mass mailings would probably have most of the information you'd want; you might not even need to go directly to the USPS.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Oddly enough my original example zip code does fall partly in weld county and partly in boulder county.
I didn't realize we were even close to the biggest county.
an abandoned lot, a single household, multiple houses, or a highrise apartment complex
In each of these cases, if one person in the ZIP+4 qualifies for broadband then there is a very very high chance that all people in the ZIP+4 will qualify for broadband.
The current system takes each ZIP that has broadband and multiplies with the number of people in the zip to get an estimate of people with broadband. If you do that with ZIP+4 and people in the ZIP+4 then you'll get a much more accurate result without having to query every single house and apartment.
If I haven't paid for the bandwidth I use, then why do I have so many bank records of money going to Time Warner every month? I haven't illegally tapped into Roadrunner, and I don't transfer 72GB of data every month!!
7Mbps for an introductory price of $29.99, going up to $44.99. That's the agreement they market. I would be surprised if it wasn't oversold. I don't use an average of 5Mbps, and I don't know of anyone who does on their home broadband or business class. Roadrunner would be stupid acquire 5Mbs* bandwidth when they only need enough to reasonably meet peak requirement, but the bandwidth I use, say 2GB/month as guess, has been paid for by me. Throw in around 30 customers (at $30-$45 each) and we're paying 4 digits for 5Mbps of dedicated bandwidth. Even 15 customers would be paying in the neighborhood of $500/month. If that doesn't cover it, they would have been charging more several years ago: The networking equipment was more expensive then, they were having to deploy it everywhere, early adopters would pay a premium, they have plenty of money to keep installing this all over, and they can afford those annoying commercials for beepbeep.com.
I don't know what other equipment you would need, but the cost of the fiber doesn't seem very expensive. In a population dense area, any downtown area would suffice, you could even provide 10Mbps dedicated bandwidth to 1000 customers on a single high-end Ethernet cable (10 GbE). I've read that the cost of hardware for broadband is tiny compared to the cost of labor to install it. From what I can piece together on internetworking costs, customer bandwidth costs seem to be covered by fees charged to the customers. I want the companies to stop whining about costs, and stop trying to double-bill the bandwidth usage. If I own a long distance service through AT&T, they can't bill the remote telephone company for my long distance calling. How is this any different?!