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."

Comments

Meh. The claim wasn't impressive to begin with.

[dgatwood]

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.

Re: Meh. The claim wasn't impressive to begin wit

[Anonymous Coward]

Iâ(TM)d like to see the number of Americans with access to two or more providers at 25Mbps or higher. Show us how we are subjected to localized monopolies.

Courier by US Robotics 9600 bps

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that was living! Then 14400! And 19200, which somehow became 56k! 56k modem motherfucka! Living la vida loca!

Re:Courier by US Robotics 9600 bps

[ClickOnThis]

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.

Re:Courier by US Robotics 9600 bps

[jimbo]

My fondest memory is from when I replaced the USRobotics modem with a ZyXEL ISDN device. ISDN was amazing.

Re:Courier by US Robotics 9600 bps

[NormalVisual]

Yeah, ISDN was pretty cool if you were coming from dialup. Only thing I didn't like was being charged per channel, so I usually ran on a single channel and only switched to dual-channel when I really needed it. I had it for about five years, until I discovered that DSL was in fact available where I lived, contrary to what BellSouth's availability site said.

I worked for a company once

[rsilvergun]

that was in the process of sending our jobs to offshore. It was customer service and the only problem was the quality scores of the offshore folks were abysmal.

Somehow or another an "error" occurred and all of the offshore scores got attributed to us. Not long after the jobs finished going overseas.

You'll never once convince me that an "error" that benefits people in power is anything of the sort. Seen it way, way too often.

Re:I worked for a company once

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump Jr employs undocumented workers for 25 years until NOW, when they finally realize people are checking the books, and they fire them expecting the problem to go away and dumb Republican faggots not to notice. Congratulations.

You're a dumb nazi faggot.

Re: I worked for a company once

[kenh]

So trump was wrong for hiring illegals AND was wrong for firing them.

Amazingly, you are able to hold two conflicting ideas as true at the same time - Trump shouldn't have hired illegals, and trump shouldn't have fired them for being illegal.

How long have you suffered with Trump Derangement Syndrome?

I don't understand

[WaffleMonster]

How it is even possible for FCC to fail basic sanity checking of deployment data.

Given the number of small shops submitting data one would think FCC would be spending a significant amount of effort cross checking data.

Simply overlaying providers broadband subscription with deployment for certain fixed access technologies would have instantaneously keyed FCC on to a problem. Claims of total state wide FTTP deployment of all things would be absolutely trivial to spot.

Re:I don't understand

[whoever57]

How it is even possible for FCC to fail basic sanity checking of deployment data.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Re:I don't understand

[Kjella]

Or it's an effect of cost-cutting and automation demands. I work for an organization that's done a lot of manual vetting, fact-checking, reminders, warnings, follow-ups, massaging and approving of data. Basically some people expect us to screen everything for junk and what comes out in the other end should be as complete and correct as reasonably possible. This takes a lot of time and effort on our part and we're only supposed to do light QA but we did it anyway. There's now a big push for GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - instead of continuing to cuddle with and cover for them we want to it to go unaltered through non-stop to put it on display and push for consequences - legal, financial and in public relations.

Re:I don't understand

[Ol Olsoc]

How it is even possible for FCC to fail basic sanity checking of deployment data.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Or plain old lying fits the bill as well.

Re:I don't understand

[AndrewFlagg]

he does not - but its a free world. once a tool, still a tool, always a tool. vote with your feet and your keystrokes.

Re:I don't understand

[WaffleMonster]

Or it's an effect of cost-cutting and automation demands. I work for an organization that's done a lot of manual vetting, fact-checking, reminders, warnings, follow-ups, massaging and approving of data.

Basically some people expect us to screen everything for junk and what comes out in the other end should be as complete and correct as reasonably possible.

Apparently HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars have been spent on the broadband map. This does not include any of the source data all of which is provided by third parties using a data exchange format of FCC's choosing.

Alright, that's it.

[ClickOnThis]

Look Slashdot. I am a firm believer in freedom of expression, even if it's something I don't agree with. In fact, I can tolerate it even if it's toxic.

But when these troll-accounts keep submitting identical ASCII-art hate-speech that needs to be modded down before it disappears from all of our screens (at work or at home) then it's time to take action. I don't want to have swastikas or GNAA pictures for my co-workers to see. Do you really want to become an NSFW site?

These sick people are playing you. They have a right to express themselves, but you, as a non-government entity, are not obliged to hand them a megaphone.

For the love of FSM, do something! Create a -2 or -3 Karma, or blacklist sources or (quasi-identical posts) as spam. Most of us, whatever our position, want to engage in a rational dialogue here. Those who don't should be modded down to a faint whisper, if that.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[ClickOnThis]

Slashdot isn't going to change anything, because they revel in the muckraking these idiots do. This is the site now; abandon it or get used to it.

They won't get ad revenue if their members don't visit the site. And many of them won't visit the site if there's a sudden unavoidable splash of swastikas or other racial content. These trolls are clever. They want to use Slashdot for their own purposes. Don't let them. Bury them into the basement.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Don't browse at score 0, problem solved. Or am I missing something?

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're playing YOU. Slashdot is one of the few web sites which still allow anonymous posting, and it works due to the moderation system. It's not without faults, but if you browse at 1, which is the default, instead of 0, you won't see those trash comments.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is great and works well if you're a regular user, but /. won't get any new people registering if they (by default) browse at 0 or -1.

It should be relatively easy to auto-mod down people posting ascii-art, and run a lexical+regexp analysis of the text posted (obviously the N[.?]+ bomb should never appear in legitimate posts, 99.999% of the time etc - so auto-mod down those to -2 straight away, then people can mod-up if they care). There would be people trying to get around this, but because if would then be an effort-based approach to spamming, those people may give up relatively quickly.

And for people up-voting the GNAA crap and other hate posts, it would be then simply to log those particular accounts, and apply a negative weight to any further posts they try to mod, ever. (and new accounts have small mod weights to begin with until some contribution based or rating based system that can detect positive posts can update their weighting)

A couple of small changes here and there would rapidly bring up the quality of comments on the site and finish off all that hate speech

Re:Alright, that's it.

[No Longer an AC]

I accidentally came into this thread browsing at -1. That was a mistake, but browsing at zero isn't too bad if you just accept that there may be some garbage to skip over. You can usually tell within the first few words.

It sucks for ACs that are actually trying to contribute something worthwhile that a handful of abusive ACs lead most people just to ignore all of them.

And before you say they should just get an account, I'm no longer an AC.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forcing people to browse only top rated posts *is* pushing people into submitting to groupthink, idiot.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[BytePusher]

Slashdot isn’t going to do anything because no one works at Slashdot. They do the bare minimum to make the site function similarly to how it did in 1999. How hard is it to support Unicode in 2019? Yet here we are...

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Ol Olsoc]

Forcing people to browse only top rated posts *is* pushing people into submitting to groupthink, idiot.

When I get mod points, I open the level filter. You make a choice. Want to start a 1? open an account. Want to be a Coward? post and accept starting at 0. That's it. Simple. You can still pot your swastikas or homopsychosexual creepposts. But no one is obliged to see them. Groupthink.... that's funny.

Cruising Slashdot at -1 is just like browsing without adblocking. No thanks.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[drinkypoo]

Agreed. /. needs to long duration site-bans for any IP address that posts the garbage parent is talking about, even if there are legit users from that IP address.

No, that's a terrible idea. Lots of small-to-medium-sized ISPs funnel all their web traffic through a single IP. I've been hit with IP bans before because of that kind of crap, and I'm not even in the same town as the offender.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[ClickOnThis]

When I get mod points, I open the level filter. You make a choice. Want to start a 1? open an account. Want to be a Coward? post and accept starting at 0. That's it. Simple.

When I get mod points, I browse at -1. As the moderator guidelines say (or used to say?) you should be on the lookout for other abusive moderators, and have the chance to repair their harm.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Ol Olsoc]

When I get mod points, I open the level filter. You make a choice. Want to start a 1? open an account. Want to be a Coward? post and accept starting at 0. That's it. Simple.

When I get mod points, I browse at -1. As the moderator guidelines say (or used to say?) you should be on the lookout for other abusive moderators, and have the chance to repair their harm.

I tought that was what I said.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[weilawei]

Did I miss something? An entire comment thread on this article just up and disappeared. Like... actual comments. The post count dropped from north of 90 to 84.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[weilawei]

Apparently there are some mods abusing the system. I've been hanging around this story all morning, because it's Saturday and I can relax and be lazy reloading Slashdot.

But I'm really irked. An entire comment thread, starting with a comment about the nature of the community filtering out easily offended people, just vanished. At least 6 posts.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Slashdot has always had this stuff. The solution is not to brows at score 0 unless you're moderating. Jeez. Those people spend SO much time on their bullshit and so few people read it. There's no such thing as -2, by the way.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[ClickOnThis]

When I get mod points, I open the level filter. You make a choice. Want to start a 1? open an account. Want to be a Coward? post and accept starting at 0. That's it. Simple.

When I get mod points, I browse at -1. As the moderator guidelines say (or used to say?) you should be on the lookout for other abusive moderators, and have the chance to repair their harm.

I tought that was what I said.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant when you said "open the level filter".

Re:Alright, that's it.

[weilawei]

Want to share? I'd be happy to help repost the removed content.

You know, I just emailed feedback@slashdot saying I'd like to donate--moments before those posts were removed. But I won't give an attocent if you're going to delete posts, objectionable or otherwise. Those comment threads weren't even shitposts--there was a debate going.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[Ol Olsoc]

When I get mod points, I open the level filter. You make a choice. Want to start a 1? open an account. Want to be a Coward? post and accept starting at 0. That's it. Simple.

When I get mod points, I browse at -1. As the moderator guidelines say (or used to say?) you should be on the lookout for other abusive moderators, and have the chance to repair their harm.

I tought that was what I said.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant when you said "open the level filter".

No problem - I did use non-standard terms.

Re:Alright, that's it.

[ClickOnThis]

But I'm really irked. An entire comment thread, starting with a comment about the nature of the community filtering out easily offended people, just vanished. At least 6 posts.

I think I commented in that thread. It no longer exists. The post on my comments page goes to a page with a message that says as much.

The thread did not begin with a comment about filtering out easily-offended people. It began with an offensive GNAA post that had an all-caps racially-explicit subject-line. It was followed by several posts denouncing it. And it was the first post. I think Slashdot nuked it. If they did, I don't blame them. You don't want a comment-thread with a subject-line like that as the first thing people see when they open the story.

Re:Meh. The claim wasn't impressive to begin with.

[thegarbz]

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.

That's not true, or rather is true only from the theoretical maximum for each technology ignoring distances and losses. The fastest phone based internet system available at a distance of more than 1.5km from an exchange is VDSL2 which clocks in at 25Mbps. There's no upgrade there. There's no possibility of speed increase without fundamental infrastructure changes. On top of that the boost over ADSL2+ was marginal since at 1.5km that 16 year old service was already able to deliver 21Mbps.

This is precisely why pushing internet over phone is so expensive to upgrade, you either need to create many localised nodes to bring DSLAMs closer to the end user which requires rolling out of fibre for backhaul, or if you're already doing that you may as well just change the physical layer and roll out fibre to the user.

Very different situations ....

[King_TJ]

I agree with what you're saying .... that businesses may purposely "make mistakes" that help them get an agenda through.

That really doesn't sound like the same thing as asking every ISP in America to report its customer count, and having just about all of them do so properly except for ONE small provider? (It looks like they misinterpreted the instructions and marked off the population of their entire coverage area, vs. listing how many customers they actually had in those geographic areas they could potentially service.)

Re: The problem with that is...

[ClickOnThis]

There is a lameness filter that stops you from posting racial epithets and all-caps.

Why can't the lameness filter stop people from posting near-identical ASCII art over and over and over again?

Oh that's a hoot

[Camarillo Brillo]

Wait.... that means that people in the Tramp administration are uninformed or lying...I can't believe that! Peace and Happiness Be Here Now

In quasi-fairness....

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

And hackers, if you are listening....

[BrendaEM]

For such a enemy of humanity's greatest invention, we really know very little about him.

Re:poopoo avenue

[Ol Olsoc]

Did they measure how many designated shitting streets there are in each census block?

Where on earth did that come from?

Re:Meh. The claim wasn't impressive to begin with.

[nasch]

I don't know who's right, but this is talking about fixed broadband, so phone technologies are a different topic.

No shit...

[Chas]

Color me stunned. Just stunned...

Here's my "stunned" face. =|

Gigantic Error

[kenh]

AKA, incorrect filing by a new company.

Is that really 'gigantic'? Hyperbole much?

Re:And I'm still wondering

[weilawei]

I don't want anything removed. It's also okay and normal to be offended at things.

Being offended is not mutually exclusive to free speech. It's only when authoritarians like yourself suggest that an external third party to my own brain should be allowed to decide what I see that there becomes an issue.

Re: You DO know they are the same, right?

[nasch]

I thought he was talking about cell phones. But thanks so much for your kind response and giving others the benefit of the doubt. You're really elevating the discourse. /s in case you can't figure that out.

Re:Meh. The claim wasn't impressive to begin with.

[dgatwood]

That's not true, or rather is true only from the theoretical maximum for each technology ignoring distances and losses. The fastest phone based internet system available at a distance of more than 1.5km from an exchange is VDSL2 which clocks in at 25Mbps.

To be honest, I was trying to pretend that VDSL/VDSL2 didn't exist. They're basically a way of lowering the cost of fiber by not quite making it reach your house. But in areas where it is actually deployed, that means you have fiber really, really close to your house, so even if you're one of the very, very few people who just happens to live in that tiny distance band where VDSL is possible at 25 Mbps but not 50 Mbps, the cost of getting actual fiber should be low enough that an average person could probably afford to pay for it (as in a few hundred to a few thousand bucks, max).

That said, AFAIK, VDSL2 is nowhere near 25 Mbps even at 1.5 km unless you're doing some sort of channel bonding (read "flaky as heck"). I think it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 Mbps at 1.5 km (source: Versatek). You don't get 25 Mbps until the distance to the node is around three or four hundred meters.

And if you happen to be unlucky enough to be right at 400 meters, you can still get almost 50 Mbps via VDSL (not 2). VDSL2 is only faster from about 250 meters down, and at that point, you're really, really close to 50 Mbps.

So although I might be slightly off, it's pretty much within the margin of error. :-)

Pai is an idiot, just like his boss

[cj9er]

The guy is an industry stooge and shill. Are we surprised any longer at what this moron does? Moron is as Moron does, that's what Momma used to say...