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Ajit Pai's Rosy Broadband Deployment Claim May Be Based On Gigantic Error (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pai's claim was questionable from the beginning, as we detailed last month. The Federal Communications Commission data cited by Chairman Pai merely showed that deployment continued at about the same rate seen during the Obama administration. Despite that, Pai claimed that new broadband deployed in 2017 was made possible by the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment." But even the modest gains cited by Pai rely partly on the implausible claims of one ISP that apparently submitted false broadband coverage data to the FCC, advocacy group Free Press told the FCC in a filing this week.
The FCC data is based on Form 477 filings made by ISPs from around the country. A new Form 477 filer called Barrier Communications Corporation, doing business as BarrierFree, suddenly "claimed deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons," Free Press Research Director Derek Turner wrote. "This claimed level of deployment stood out to us for numerous reasons, including the impossibility of a new entrant going from serving zero census blocks as of June 30, 2017, to serving nearly 1.5 million blocks containing nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population in just six months time," Turner wrote. "We further examined the underlying Form 477 data and discovered that BarrierFree appears to have simply submitted as its coverage area a list of every single census block in each of eight states in which it claimed service: CT, DC, MD, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VA." In reality, BarrierFree's website doesn't market any fiber-to-the-home service, and it advertises wireless home Internet speeds of up to just 25mbps, Free Press noted. BarrierFree appears to have ignored the FCC's instructions to report service only in census blocks in which an ISP currently offers service and instead simply "listed every single census block located in eight of the states in which it's registered as a CLEC [competitive local exchange carrier]."
As a result of BarrierFree's claimed level of deployment, it skewed the FCC's overall data significantly. "Pai claimed that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband with speeds of at least 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up 'has dropped by over 25 percent, from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017,'" reports Ars. "With BarrierFree's erroneous filing removed, 'the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed broadband connection at the 25Mbps/3Mbps threshold declined to 21.3 million, not 19.4 million,' Free Press wrote."
The FCC data is based on Form 477 filings made by ISPs from around the country. A new Form 477 filer called Barrier Communications Corporation, doing business as BarrierFree, suddenly "claimed deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons," Free Press Research Director Derek Turner wrote. "This claimed level of deployment stood out to us for numerous reasons, including the impossibility of a new entrant going from serving zero census blocks as of June 30, 2017, to serving nearly 1.5 million blocks containing nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population in just six months time," Turner wrote. "We further examined the underlying Form 477 data and discovered that BarrierFree appears to have simply submitted as its coverage area a list of every single census block in each of eight states in which it claimed service: CT, DC, MD, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VA." In reality, BarrierFree's website doesn't market any fiber-to-the-home service, and it advertises wireless home Internet speeds of up to just 25mbps, Free Press noted. BarrierFree appears to have ignored the FCC's instructions to report service only in census blocks in which an ISP currently offers service and instead simply "listed every single census block located in eight of the states in which it's registered as a CLEC [competitive local exchange carrier]."
As a result of BarrierFree's claimed level of deployment, it skewed the FCC's overall data significantly. "Pai claimed that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband with speeds of at least 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up 'has dropped by over 25 percent, from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017,'" reports Ars. "With BarrierFree's erroneous filing removed, 'the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed broadband connection at the 25Mbps/3Mbps threshold declined to 21.3 million, not 19.4 million,' Free Press wrote."
Whether the number of people without broadband dropped from 7.7% in 2016 to is 5.9% or 6.5% in 2019, that's still only at most 1.8% in two years, versus 2.7% in the previous one year, under Obama and the Democrat-run FCC. So that's actually a really horrible level of growth.
The numbers for 50 Mbps service are mostly meaningless when it comes to actual broadband growth. Every physical layer that can actually carry 25 Mbps service can also carry 50 Mbps service with only minor changes to the equipment at either end. The only thing that proves is that consumers are demanding more bandwidth.
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Now that was living! Then 14400! And 19200, which somehow became 56k! 56k modem motherfucka! Living la vida loca!
Luxury! I remember 110 baud (yes, baud) modems that literally used your phone, with the receiver cradled in an acoustic coupler.
Crimminy, these young'uns.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
To be somewhat fair, it's reasonable to expect an ever slowing rollout of service (outside disrupting technology). That's because obviously the easiest ones will be done first.
That's not the full cause for the slowdown, of course. But it shouldn't be dismissed.
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