Microsoft Again Slams America's Shaky Broadband Maps
from the you-can't-fix-a-problem-you-don't-understand dept
We've long noted how US telecom policy never really accomplishes much because the underlying data we use to make decisions is hot garbage. The FCC doesn't really spend much time fact checking industry availability and speed claims, resulting in coverage maps that hugely overstate broadband speed, availability, and overall competition. When efforts to improve US broadband mapping pop up, the telecom sector routinely lobbies to kill them, lest somebody actually get a good idea of the broken state of US telecom.
Outside of consumers and consumer groups, nobody much cares about this perpetual dance of dysfunction. One lone exception has been Microsoft, which has been increasingly highlighting the shaky quality of US broadband mapping data. Microsoft has been a major backer of White Space broadband, which utilizes the spectrum freed by the migration to digital television as a new emerging broadband option.
In a recent blog post the company argued that the FCC is potentially overstating US broadband (defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps downstream) availability on a fairly epic scale. In part because the agency isn't verifying ISP claims, but also because when an ISP serves just one home in a census block, the FCC takes that to mean the entire census block is connected to broadband. Microsoft's data shows that 162 million Americans don't technically use "broadband" (25 Mbps), often because they can't get it or it's not affordable.
That's why when the Pai FCC recently released yet another survey claiming that American broadband was wonderful (falsely claiming things like killing net neutrality was the reason why), Microsoft issued a statement attempting to correct the record:
"We share the FCC’s commitment to closing the digital divide in rural America, but we have concerns that this report continues to rely on inaccurate coverage data. There is strong evidence, including the FCC’s own subscription data and Microsoft data, that broadband is not available to millions of people in America even though the FCC’s data says it is. We hope that, moving forward, the FCC adopts appropriate solutions as we’ve previously outlined to improve the accuracy of broadband mapping so the country can more quickly close the digital divide."
With Ajit Pai's FCC widely now seen as a mindless rubber stamp for the interests of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, there's not much chance it's going to lead the charge on better mapping. Sensing the levees of frustration about to break on this subject, the telecom lobby (US Telecom) has been pushing for its own mapping proposal experts tell me has one real function: to try and keep real, accurate data out of the hands of American consumers:
“I think we should be extremely skeptical of taking ideas from an industry that has chosen to avoid competing with cable companies as the arbiter of accurate mapping that will measure the state of competition and access,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Ernesto Falcon told Motherboard via email. “They have every interest in hiding the ball of how badly the United States is behind on fiber to the home deployment as they are generally seen as the companies that should be leading that effort."
"We are concerned about the true motivations of this industry-led effort, and fear that the end result will be only marginal improvements in accuracy but a major loss in transparency and public access to the underlying data,” [Free Press' Derek] Turner said.
Accurate, transparently available data would highlight how US telcos have all but refused to upgrade their aging DSL networks as they fixate on wireless video, giving cable giants like Comcast and Spectrum a growing monopoly over next generation speeds (and no, 5G isn't magically going to fix it). But if you fix the mapping data and provide America an accurate picture on how it's getting screwed (especially on price), somebody might just get the crazy idea to actually fix it -- and we sure as hell wouldn't want that.
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Filed Under: accuracy, broadband, broadband maps, competition, data, fcc
Companies: microsoft
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lol
Uh oh. Microsoft's bid to ditch the disc in its XBOX and pushing Windows 10 as the last OS you will buy is starting to look shaky if large swaths of America don't have access to reliable, cheap and uncapped broadband.
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as bad as America is on this front, it isn't the only country that is a long way behind. the likes of S.Korea, Vietnam, and other Asian countries are leaps and bounds in front! as long as their are politicians and organisations like the FCC that can ignore the public, allow companies to ignore their responsibilities to supply their product to the public, as they are supposed to do, and having taken subsidies, tax payers dollars, to enable them to do so, nothing will change! politicians are far more concerned in remaining in their positions and will do whatever they have to do stay there. the only way to change it is with votes. but there is, in my opinion, no excuse for government bodies that are supposed to be for the benefit of the people to do the opposite!!
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Re: lol
Between Microsoft, Google, Akamai and other CDNs, they probably have enough data to create the definitive speed map, for both download and upload speeds, for the U.S. and most other countries. I believe they won't actually do this because they all rely on those ISPs (and backbone providers) for their continued existence.
Can you imagine the detail, at least for wireless data speeds, if all of Google Maps' cars did the same sort of data collection as was done by that guy in Vermont
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/01/690071045/one-mans-quest-to-prove-vermont-has-terrible-cell-service[ link to this | view in thread ]
Google got that idea, and Google Fiber was the proposed mechanism. Look how that turned out.
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fun things..
Lets see...
2..FCC has 1454 employees, Can anyone Find a location that tells us ALL the jobs the FCC is supposed to do... as far as I can tell thats enough personnel for janitors..
https://www.usajobs.gov/Search?l=&l=&a=FC00&wma=15509
WOW, all in DC..
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Re: lol
Hahaha - that is pretty funny.
Microsoft in their eager money grab overlooked the lack of moderate speed internet to rural areas and therefore The Farmer In The Dell will not be able to use the new fangled Microsoft software as a service product.
Let me reiterate ..... AAAHahahahahahahaha
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Maps are rubish
Where I live (in a city over about 100,000), the maps say I have 12 choices... which are mostly just different services available from the same providers. There's supposedly five different providers here, but two are satellite, which is not a viable source for broadband given the horrific caps and tiny upload speeds, one doesn't actually exist, one just went bankrupt (Windstream), and the last is Spectrum. Guess which service I have? Only one guess needed.
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The FCC has 1454 employees
Microsoft's military / enforcement subdivision is considerably bigger than that.
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Re:
It's kinda enlightening that Google plowed (literally) billions of dollars into fiber and they still couldn't compete with the entrenched ISP's and their pet politicians.
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Re: The FCC has 1454 employees
dont think they will tech them the equipment to test all this..
Or use the net and GPS to spot every location..Unless its a phone.
(which would be a great trick for the ISP, use a Phone GPS to document coverage..)
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Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too difficult
Here's a prototype we did: It's a 100 mb download map, it works in Chrome and Edge browsers, but most other browsers will choke. It takes about a minute to open, depending on your CPU speed.
Move your mouse over your favorite cities to see what services are real.
http://expressoptimizer.net/projects/Demos/US underserved.html
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Another demonstration...
...that lobbying state officials is the best investment of capital of any business, usually returning $24+ on the dollar.
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Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too difficult
The link in my original post is now working. the link should be "http://expressoptimizer.net/projects/Demos/US underserved.html" but the message board software stopped at the "space" Sorry.
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Re: lol
I'm sure MS's motivation here isn't altruistic, but so what? They're on the right side of this one. I'll accept their help regardless of how I feel about them otherwise.
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Re: Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too difficult
hi - would love to see this map - is there supposed to be a space between US and underserved.html? If so it may not work... is it an underscore?
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Re: Re: Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too difficul
It's a space between US and underserved. It's a really massive file and will crash most browsers. http://expressoptimizer.net/projects/Demos/US%20underserved.html
A more browser friendly version uglier work in progress (missing population and household data and no shapefile content) is here: http://expressoptimizer.net/projects/Demos/USMLAB.html
The real point of this is irrespective of FCC 477 data, 41% of all speed tests done in the U.S. and Canada show download speeds less than 25 mbps and the actual service providers rarely match the FCC data.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too diff
1 this is great work
2 How complete is the M-Lab dataset?
3 the USDA also is very concerned about mapping undeserved areas
The above comment: "Between Microsoft, Google, Akamai and other CDNs, they probably have enough data to create the definitive speed map, for both download and upload speeds" makes a good deal of sense to me as well.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too diff
not sure why writing is huge - Also link #1 redirects to link #2
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Getting an accurate broadband map isn't too
re your two comments. We're already chatting with USDA. The geographic resolution isn't as good as it should be. Ultimately we need it to the block group, which means a crowdsource app has to be run in every block group. We have an app for that. :) Also, I was killing too many browsers, so I made the Select the state version and routed everything to that. It's about 350 million samples from the U.S. and Canada. I should calculate error margins for each city... maybe tomorrow.
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