Broadband Availability Data Should Improve with Passage of Broadband DATA Act

Broadband availability data should improve with the March 10 passage of the Broadband DATA Act. The legislation now just awaits President Donald Trump’s signature before becoming law. Key provisions of the bill include:

• Requiring the Federal Communications Commission to collect granular service availability data from wired, fixed wireless, and satellite broadband providers.
• Establishing strong parameters for service availability data collected from mobile broadband providers to ensure accuracy.
• Permitting the FCC to consider whether to collect verified coverage data from state, local, and tribal governments, as well as from other entities.
• Creating a process for consumers; state, local, and tribal governments; and other groups to challenge FCC maps with their own data, and require the FCC to determine how to structure that process without making it overly burdensome on challengers.
• Establishing a crowdsourcing process that allows the public to participate in data collection.
• Strengthening enforcement against providers that knowingly or recklessly submit materially inaccurate broadband data.
• Requiring the FCC to use the newly-created maps when making new awards of broadband funding.

The Broadband DATA Act seems to reflect lessons learned from previous broadband data collection efforts. For example, the decision to strengthen enforcement against providers that submit inaccurate data likely stemmed from an embarrassing situation in 2019 when a small internet service provider over-reported the number of people to whom it could provide service by about two million – a reporting error that the FCC passed through into its annual broadband progress report. And the plan to establish strong parameters for service availability data likely stemmed from another embarrassing situation: The FCC proposed to cancel plans for a mobility fund that would have covered some of the costs of bringing LTE to unserved areas because it had no way of accurately determining target areas. Several carriers said their coverage was broader than it actually was – and a challenge process yielded similarly unreliable information.