Quantifying the Overstatement in Broadband Availability from the Form 477 Data: An Econometric Approach

Broadband availability data is collected from broadband providers at the census block level, which is the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau for data tabulation. In collecting and reporting these data, it is assumed that if a single home in a census block has access to broadband (however defined), then every home in the census block has broadband. Plainly, this “all-in assumption,” as I will call it, overstates broadband availability to some degree, and this overstatement is the source of much discontent and debate—so much so that some have even gone so far as to describe these data as “fake news.” While the all-in assumption certainly overstates broadband availability to some extent, to date there has been no effort to quantify the magnitude of the overstatement.