FCC Claims Revised Draft Broadband Report Still Shows a Narrowing Digital Divide

The Federal Communications Commission has revised the 2019 Broadband Deployment Report to reflect a thorough review of the initial draft triggered by the discovery that a company submitted drastically overstated deployment data to the FCC. But the FCC still concludes that significant progress has been made in closing the digital divide in America. The revised report shows that since the last report, the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed terrestrial broadband connection meeting the FCC’s advanced telecommunications capability benchmark speed of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps has dropped by over 18%, from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million at the end of 2017. Moreover, the majority of those gaining access to such high-speed connections, approximately 4.3 million, live in rural America, where broadband deployment has traditionally lagged.

The number of Americans with access to at least 250 Mbps/25 Mbps broadband grew in 2017 by more than 36%, to 191.5 million. And the number of rural Americans with access to such broadband increased by 85.1% in 2017. In addition, the number of Americans with access to 100 Mbps/10 Mbps broadband grew in 2017 by more than 18%, to 288.4 million, while the number of rural Americans with access to such broadband increased by 44% in 2017, to 37.4 million.

Free Press was able to discover the huge error that led to the revision. Free Press General Counsel and VP of Policy Matt Wood said:

We're very glad to see that the FCC has addressed the error Free Press identified. While Chairman Pai isn't a big-enough person to say our name or to mention Free Press's role in discovering an error that had eluded staff, we will take heart in the good result and leave Pai's pettiness out of it. Of course, fixing this error doesn't fix the other huge flaw we cited in our letter about BarrierFree: the Pai FCC keeps trying to take credit for broadband deployment and speed increases well under way before and during Title II's reinstatement. So when Chairman Pai takes credit for ISP investment and improvements he quite literally had nothing to do with, it's an ongoing embarrassment that simply revising the numbers down cannot fix.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said she won't support the report's conclusions.

While it's a good thing the FCC has finally fixed this mess with its data, the fact of the matter is that millions of American households—in rural and urban communities—have no access to high-speed service. That's a problem. With tens of millions of Americans without access to broadband, it's simply not credible for the agency to conclude that broadband deployment across the country is reasonable and timely.

 


Revised Draft Broadband Report Still Shows a Narrowing Digital Divide Ajit Pai fixes big error in FCC data, still claims he was right all along (Ars Technica)