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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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: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.

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: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.