The FCC and broadband providers have known for months, if not years, that current broadband deployment figures reported through required Form 477  radically overstates actual broadband deployment in the country.  The problem is that service availability is measured by census blocks and not by actual consumer and business locations.  

The overstatement of broadband is especially egregious in rural areas where census blocks are often very large. When such blocks count as having broadband, it vastly overstates the number of people that actual have service available.

This fundamental problem with Form 477 and the deployment maps provided by broadband companies became an acute embarrassment for the industry when it was revealed that much of the success the Commission recently touted in a draft of its Annual Broadband Deployment Report was due to one company's complete misunderstanding of Form 477.  If that company served one census block in a state, it erroneously reported that broadband was deployed throughout that state.  Oops!

Much to my surprise, after their net neutrality public relations fiasco, broadband deployers have awoken and sensed that they are going to be made the “bad guys” again.  They know that virtue to their size and dominance, they will be blamed for the overstatement of rural broadband deployment even if the problem is the inherent inaccuracy of the data requested by the FCC.  

Thus, USTelecom, the traditional ILEC association which now calls itself the Broadband Association, just announced it will start a Broadband Mapping Initiative which will begin with a pilot program in which every location in Missouri and Virginia will be aggregated to create a “Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric” to identify specific locations that need broadband access.  According to USTelecom, here is how it will work.

• Multiple sources of address, building, and parcel data will be used to develop and validate a comprehensive database of all broadband serviceable locations in the two pilot states.
• A vendor will conform address formats, remove duplicates, and using a geo-referencing tool assign a unique latitude and longitude to the actual building where broadband service is most likely to be installed.
• Customer address lists provided by participating companies will augment the validation process and will be automatically indexed to the final database to facilitate accurate broadband availability reporting. Different methods for reporting service availability will be tested.
• The pilot will also develop and test a mediated crowdsourcing platform that will enable consumers to submit information to improve the accuracy of the database.

If the initiative is successful, USTelecom will use it as a proof of concept and recommend to the FCC that it be adopted nationally.  The pilot, mapping Missouri and Virginia locations, is expected to take four to six months.  USTelecom estimates that it would take 18 months to two years to adopt it for the entire country.  

If the Commission decides to take the mapping nationally, broadband deployers seek the public’s help to ensure accuracy:

Should this process then be adopted for use at the national level, we envision a separate portal and process would be designed to allow the public to assist by submitting data to improve both the location fabric and the broadband availability information. Creating a database at this level of granularity is a major endeavor and enlisting the help of consumers or state officials on the ground will help confirm, correct, or refine the data in the BSLF. We are attempting to map in a highly dynamic environment where service deployment, homebuilding, business development, natural disasters, and developments in GIS resources create a constantly changing landscape that must be updated and improved over time.  In addition to a systematic schedule to refresh data and reporting, this proposal is designed to support a cooperative, collaborative approach to creating and maintaining an important national data source.  (Docket 11-10, March 21, 2019 USTelecom letter to FCC, at p. 3.).

The feeling here is that the more proactive actions broadband providers and the FCC take to fix the broadband deployment problem, the better.  The longer they wait, the more likely Congress is to act.