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FCC To Probe Whether Carriers Gave Inaccurate Broadband Coverage Data (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lie-detector dept.

The FCC is launching an investigation into whether one or more major carriers gave the agency inaccurate maps of their broadband coverage, violating the rules of an initiative that provides subsidies for rural coverage. ZDNet reports: The initiative, called the Mobility Fund Phase II program "can play a key role in extending high-speed Internet access to rural areas across America," he continued. "In order to reach those areas, it's critical that we know where access is and where it is not."

The initiative is reallocating $4.5 billion in previously-approved funding to bring high-speed mobile broadband service to rural Americans over the course of 10 years. The agency is using a competitive reverse auction to distribute the funds to private providers. To determine eligibility, mobile providers were required to submit current, standardized coverage data.

25 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Easy way to tell by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    1) Get a Magic 8-ball.
    2) Remove the inside octagonal die.
    3) Paint on every surface "All signs point to YES".
    4) Re-insert, and shake for answer.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re: Easy way to tell by mermeid007 · · Score: 1

      Dang! You had me going there for a minute! :)

    2. Re:Easy way to tell by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      In theory yes, in practice I doubt it. Remember, this is Ajit Pai's FCC, not the FCC of old, their task will be to figure out how the carriers' positions can be interpreted so that no action is required, not to slap the carriers upside the head for lying to them.

  2. Telcos will always lie by WCMI92 · · Score: 1

    There are the three laws of telcoms:

    They will:

    1. Overpromise
    2. Underdeliver
    3. Overcharge

    --
    Corporatism != Free Market
    1. Re:Telcos will always lie by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 1

      Why just telcos?

      All companies lie when they have an agenda.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    2. Re:Telcos will always lie by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Companies are made of people. Companies lie if people lie. I work for a company that doesn't lie. That's because people like me don't lie, and we don't allow people around us to lie.

      The telcos lied. So lets find the people who lied and hold them personally accountable for their lies. None of this "fine the corporation" stuff. And not all the liars are executives.

    3. Re:Telcos will always lie by mermeid007 · · Score: 1

      What is next? Any guesses?

  3. Based on the accuracy of their cellular coverage m by Mspangler · · Score: 1

    I don't even have to look at the broadband maps to tell you they are hopelessly optimistic.

  4. Re:Based on the accuracy of their cellular coverag by bobstreo · · Score: 1

    I don't even have to look at the broadband maps to tell you they are hopelessly optimistic.

    If you zoom out far enough in coverage maps, everything is fine. There is a limit on how far you can zoom in though.

    As to why the FCC accepted and didn't verify the accuracy of the "providers" data, that is a question some congressional investigatory body should dig into.

    Is there any way I can get a chunk of the 4.5 billion available for rural broadband? I promise to do just as well as any existing corporate provider has done thus-far.

  5. "whether one or more major carriers" by fred911 · · Score: 1

    I bet for the later.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  6. gave the agency inaccurate maps? by grep+-v+'.*'+* · · Score: 1

    Of _course_ not. Inaccurate you say? They're completely accurate. Oh sorry, but they're some old ones I grabbed by mistake. Here's one that's a month newer, that should be good enough to get by, right? (Hmph, I didn't realize we had a broadband customer back in the 1900s.)

    If not, please let us know and we'll keep feeding you an ever-so-slightly-updated map Every Single Time until you finally accept one. Oh, and if your request gets lost in the email -- well that just happens occasionally, doesn't it?

    --
    If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
  7. I fire liars on the spot by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My companies had a very simple rule about lying:

    We do not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.
    (Borrowed from Texas A&M)

    One time a new employee didn't know better and told the customer there was "a hard drive problem" when actually we screwed up. I let him know that if he lied again, he'd be be immediately fired. Then I called the customer and explained that we had in fact messed up.

    So no, not "all companies" are the same, because all people are not the same. Companies do what the leaders establish as the company way.

    If the leaders of an organization use funds from the organization's charity arm primarily to fund their own travel and pay themselves a large salary for running the charity, that type of thing establishes a culture and the organization will be crooked from top to bottom. If the leaders make a habit of lying to the press, everyone in the organization will lie to each other - especially to the leaders. On the other hand, if the leader writes a personal check to buy an old computer that the company is throwing away (buying it at the appropriate garage sale price), then makes sure that $25 is properly reported for tax purposes, that sets a tone of honesty and absolute integrity for the company.

    Some people may not like to work in my companies, or work with me, because I'm strict about telling the truth, even when the truth is ugly. That's okay, they can go work for a car dealer or politician. We don't want them working in my companies.

    1. Re:I fire liars on the spot by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      When you refuse to use deceit, you leave yourself wide open to those who do. Why do you think successful people rely on deceit (and its cousin secrecy)? It's because it works really, really well. If nobody can know what your goals are, how can anyone oppose you?

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    2. Re:I fire liars on the spot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think OP meant that all companies owned by shareholders, rather than individuals, eventually turn out the same. People are capable of amazingly horrible things when they're acting in groups.

    3. Re:I fire liars on the spot by ilsaloving · · Score: 1

      This reminds me of a company I worked for way back when. I was doing internal IT work. One time, I can't remember the details now, but I screwed something up.

      So the first thing I when I realized what happened, was to notify the people who would be most immediately affected, detailing what happened, how it affected them, what I was doing to fix it, and what they should do while I'm fixing it.

      The part I remember well was when someone expressed how impressed they were with my integrity. I remember being confused, because I figured this was the least I could do because not doing so would potentially compound the damage orders of magnitude more than the original mistake did.

      I was fairly young and inexperienced then, but that plus other incidents made me feel uneasy working there, and I found another job. I found out later that the company went under because of embezzlement a couple years after I left.

      So yeah. I guess the lesson here is to be open to warning signs indicating sketchy leadership.

  8. Ha! by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    I know of exact street corners where there's 3 bars of LTE with no data, or texting or phone service. Verizon lies not just on their maps but on what they tell the damn phones to display.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Ha! by Plus1Entropy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not to defend ISPs/telecoms but... it's very possible that you can have a good signal but not a good connection. The value shown on your phone comes from the RSSI, which is measured at the phone. It tells you how strongly you see the tower, but it doesn't mean the tower also sees you just as well.

      Now, of course there's a bit of handshaking so that the phone can tell the difference, but there are a lot of reasons this may not work correctly in specific circumstances. The phone could "think" there's a good connection, until you actually try to push any real data through it and suddenly it tanks. There may also be an asymmetry in the direction (e.g. you can transmit faster than you can receive). The bars you see are only an indication of how good the connection should be, based on what the phone and tower can measure about each other's signals... but it's not exact.

      It's kinda like if you measure a resistor and you say "Ok that's 1ohm, so if I put 1V on it I should get 1A through it." Except the second you actually put 1A through the resistor it heats up which means the resistance goes up and suddenly the current starts dropping (assuming in this case you are using a constant voltage supply). It doesn't mean your ohmmeter lied to you - or that Ohm's Law is wrong, it just means that the system under load behaves differently.

      The fact that you indicate it's a specific location (i.e. exact street corners) indicates that it's probably something environmental which is causing what you're seeing.

      Verizon is probably full of shit about a lot of things... but this isn't necessarily one of them.

      --
      Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
  9. Re:Why should we subsidize MAGA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Probably for the same reason our ancestors make exactly the same choice with mail delivery, universal electrification and universal phone service.

  10. Re:Why should we subsidize MAGA? by omnichad · · Score: 2

    This. You want perspectives to change in these areas? Give them exposure to the outside world. In a lot of cases, it's a cure for xenophobia if treatment it's started early.

  11. No tapering by omnichad · · Score: 2

    It's obvious when you look at the maps. If you're at the fringes of reception on a 4G tower, you're marked as 4G. Even if your signal strength and SNR are barely good enough for dial up speeds, it's happening with 4G tech. And just past that fringe, there's a hard cut off.

  12. Plenty of times I posted that our support wasn't by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Gfy has lots of posts saying "great product, sometimes support is slow". Some of those posts are from *me*. You'll never find me saying "fast support", because they wouldn't have been true.

    Phatservers had fast support, and knew our products, so that's why we discussed teaming up with them to have them do the support for those products. Because yeah, sometimes we weren't quick with support. The first step to fixing that would be honestly acknowledging the problem. I also asked them about about flying out to watch how they do support, see their process first hand. In the end, we arranged to give four different companies the tools and training to do the support - two companies supported their own customers who uses our products along with products and services from that company, tier 1 support went to a dedicated support company lead by a former employee of mine, and we were tier 2 support.

    With our hosting, we explicitly told people that if you need a lot of support, you don't want to host with us; there were other companies we'd suggest. Customers who would want to host with us would be those who valued expertise and security more than they valued quick support.

    I never said we were perfect in every way. We were *honest* about our strengths and weaknesses.

    That worked pretty well for us and for customers. Unhappy customers take up too mich time and can ruin your day, so I didn't *want* "more customers" if they were going to be unhappy customers. 99.9% of our customers were happy because they chose us knowing our weaknesses. We had already told them, if immediate 24/7 support is the most important thing to you, go pay 10 times as much for Phantom Frog. Phantom Frog has better support, and probably needs more support, we'd tell them. If you don't want to call us all the time, and you don't want to NEED to call, because the product "just works", then you might like us.

  13. Me thinks that is excuse by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    If they include such places in the coverage map then it's misleading as charged. (it's not simply my phone it's everyone in the building, android, iphone, blackberry...)

    Additionally, within milliseconds of the first handshake both ends should have enough to know what the connection is really going to support. Not a single person feels those bars mean antenna voltages, they think they mean reception quality.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Me thinks that is excuse by Plus1Entropy · · Score: 1

      Additionally, within milliseconds of the first handshake both ends should have enough to know what the connection is really going to support.

      Again, the resistor example. For the first few milliseconds, the current is basically 1A, and then it starts to drop only after some time (depending on the power dissipation capability of the resistor). There are non-linearities in the system, different effects become significant over different time periods. E.g., the handshaking happens in a few milliseconds, but it's only after 100-500ms under high load that the data rate tanks.

      I'm not disagreeing with you about the map. They probably don't go and actually test the signal everywhere, they just say "we put a tower here that can theoretically reach this far so that area is covered".

      I'm just saying that based on the physics and engineering behind how these systems work, it is absolutely possible that your phone says you have good signal when you actually don't. It doesn't mean your phone is lying to you.

      --
      Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
  14. Ajit Pai by JBMcB · · Score: 1

    I thought that, given previous headlines, when the FCC is doing something, Ajit Pai is personally responsible. Is that not the case here?

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
  15. FCC by definition by ElitistWhiner · · Score: 1

    ...is a commission. Commissions are designed to destroy anything it probes. That's how commissions work.