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.'"

Comments

DSL only recently became available for me

[Rick17JJ]

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.

Re:Isn't the Zip code unusually large

[Copid]

So they call everybody?

That doesn't sound that reasonable to me at all. They should be able to provide a list of addresses or phone numbers to the broadband provider and have that provider say yay or nay. That's how you do it on the broadband providers' web sites as it is. All the regulatory agency has to do is give a more granular list for the provider to check against in their database, and then randomly sample the results to ensure that the provider didn't make a mistake or lie to them. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.