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Microsoft Says the FCC 'Overstates' Broadband Availability In the US (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the U.S. government's terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journalist Wendy Davis. In it, Microsoft accuses the FCC of over-stating actual broadband availability and urges the agency to do better. "The Commission's broadband availability data, which underpins FCC Form 477 and the Commission's annual Section 706 report, appears to overstate the extent to which broadband is actually available throughout the nation," Microsoft said in the filing. "For example, in some areas the Commission's broadband availability data suggests that ISPs have reported significant broadband availability (25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up) while Microsoft's usage data indicates that only a small percentage of consumers actually access the Internet at broadband speeds in those areas," Microsoft said.
Similar criticism has long plagued the agency. The FCC's broadband data is received via the form 477 data collected from ISPs. But ISPs have a vested interest in over-stating broadband availability to obscure the sector's competition problems, and the FCC historically hasn't worked very hard to independently verify whether this data is truly accurate. The FCC's methodology has long been criticized as well. As it currently stands, the agency declares an entire ZIP code as "served" with broadband if just one home in an entire census block has it. In its filing, Microsoft "suggested that the Commission's ongoing effort to more accurately measure broadband could be improved by drawing on the FCC's subscription data, along with other broadband data sets from third-parties such as Microsoft, to complement survey data submitted under the current rules."
Similar criticism has long plagued the agency. The FCC's broadband data is received via the form 477 data collected from ISPs. But ISPs have a vested interest in over-stating broadband availability to obscure the sector's competition problems, and the FCC historically hasn't worked very hard to independently verify whether this data is truly accurate. The FCC's methodology has long been criticized as well. As it currently stands, the agency declares an entire ZIP code as "served" with broadband if just one home in an entire census block has it. In its filing, Microsoft "suggested that the Commission's ongoing effort to more accurately measure broadband could be improved by drawing on the FCC's subscription data, along with other broadband data sets from third-parties such as Microsoft, to complement survey data submitted under the current rules."
If I send forms to the government that I fill out purposely wrong for my financial benefit, they'll call it fraud and fine me and possibly throw my ass in jail.
Why does this not apply here?
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence... Unless it's political.
Need more honest programmers in office.
AC for president 2020!!!
Microsoft crying out that their telemetry is getting delayed
I know it's fun to MS bash here, but they are doing the right thing.
And because it's a ${BIG_CORPORATION} complaining instead of public interest groups or ${PEONS}, maybe something will actually get done (but I doubt it)
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Microsoft wants people to move to their cloudy rented OS, and limited broadband is a major stumbling block to that plan.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
And actually listed all their users' internet speed in the US as proof that the ISPs and the FCC are full of shit, that'd great.
Internet service providers are universally descriptive in the effectiveness of their connection; up to
(25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up).
Technically, and of much greater importance, legally, their advertising has not breached litigious level with this claim from the Madmen.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I mean, come on, all you speed daemons need to mellow out, just let each character scroll slowly over your screen and let the corporate megalopoly provide you with what it can charge you top dollar for.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The FCC has been hijacked by terrorist traitors who only survive due to the yellow cowardice of armed american patriots.
Or MS wants to get reimbursed by the FCC for providing their own broadband data.
Why doesn't Microsoft build a map out of all the locations that don't have broadband access? Must be an easy thing to do if you listen to them.
Dear FCC,
The telemetry of our products is now making a significant impact on Internet connections.
Please give MOAR bandwidth.
Smooches,
Microsoft Corp.
Don't invest a dime to qualified people, they'd rather setup a schedule to murder their minds.
And of course they won't say what they are going to do when everyone's overpopulating and complacent.
Verizon and AT&T are going to call a few executives at Microsoft and threaten to take their business to Google or Amazon, these executives are then going to call the people who filed the report with the FCC and tell them to abandon it or else, and that will be the end of it.
The same thing happened with Net Neutrality and it's going to happen again now.
MS, in my opinion, is still a terrible company. But I don’t think they’re wrong on this point. MS wants consumers to have access to better broadband for the company’s goals and not purely altruistic ones. But given what we know already about the FCC’s past inaccurate characterization of broadband, it’s reasonable to assume they can do it again. This time under Pai, I’m not going to assume it’s incompetence; I’m going to assume it’s dishonesy.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm a software engineer and when I bought my current home, I made the mistake of relying on the broadbandmap.gov website. It showed that I had lots of cable internet options, so you can imagine my surprise when after signing over the next 30 years of my life, that I had... get this, ZERO options available. Satellite doesn't count, because using RDS streaming to stream desktops to your machine kills bandwidth. DSL wasn't even an option, because all of the circuits were being utilized. I was lucky enough to work for a company that had some sway with a local terrestrial wireless carrier (they also run a data center), and they put up a repeater for a line-of-sight tower nearby, that granted me a 6Mbit plan with no data caps.
C. Griffin
"Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
Most of what I've seen for ADSL reporting is approximately correct where there's no false claim of 25Mbps where only 3-6 is available. On the other hand, the FCC reports still consider satellite and 3g coverage reporting at 25Mbps even though there's no way to actually receive that.
FCC and Pai are as useful as a kickstand on a cruise ship.
Microsoft steals user data from its operating system that You can't do anything about. (actually, I did something about it, but most people don't even try)
Put them together and you have a useless, lying company trying to make money with some questionable data.
Repeating the same mistakes over and over again is the definition of insanity.
They all need to stop and then go away.