The FCC Has No Idea How Many People Don't Have Broadband Access (arstechnica.com) 72
A new broadband mapping system is starting to show just how inaccurate the Federal Communications Commission's connectivity data is. From a report: In Missouri and Virginia, up to 38 percent of rural homes and businesses that the FCC counts as having broadband access actually do not, the new research found. That's more than 445,000 unconnected homes and businesses that the FCC would call "served" with its current system. Given that the new research covered just two states with a combined population of 14.6 million (or 4.5% of the 327.2 million people nationwide), it's likely that millions of homes nationwide have been wrongly counted as served by broadband. A full accounting of how the current data exaggerates access could further undercut FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's claims that repealing net neutrality rules and other consumer protection measures have dramatically expanded broadband access. His claims were already unconvincing for other reasons. The new research was conducted by CostQuest Associates, a consulting firm working for USTelecom, an industry lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, and other fiber and DSL broadband providers. USTelecom submitted a summary of the findings to the FCC on Tuesday. The two-state pilot was intended to determine the feasibility of creating a more accurate broadband map for the whole US.
Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
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The FCC Has No Idea, Period.
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Something something incompetence something something malice.
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A shit pie is better than Ajit Pai.
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We don't even get decent broadband in some major metropolitan areas unless you're going with the local cable monopoly. Ie, there is zero competition most places, the prices are too high, and the offerings are lackluster.
We can't all move to New York. We should treat the internet the way that we treated the phone system in the past - it's important enough for the nation that *everyone* have access that the government makes this happen rather than relying on the chaotic and unstable free market forces that
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But, you get the best lies that money can buy. Why do you need broadband, you can't be a mushroom, fed bullshit and kept in the dark, if you get real broadband and work together break up the monopolies. The lies spread by the US government to the citizens of the United States have been never ending and will never end, until the corrupt are prosecuted and institutionalised. No one can even pretend that Ajit Pai is doing his job properly and not entirely corrupt in the management of the FCC favouring corporat
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Cell tower coverage? (Score:2)
Be sides, what is the government really going to do to fix anything. They always take the money but never use it for what it was intended.
Just my 2 cents
Re:Cell tower coverage? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people today only use their phones?
How many do that because the alternative is slow DSL? Or expensive cable (if you don't take the bundle with TV services).
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They can't even explain why they won't upgrade my account from 3 to 6Mbps.
That probably has everything to do with your circuit length, which may be way off from your geographic distance to the DSLAM.
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No one new moving into the area can get service unless someone unless drops it.
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But...wouldn't YOU be one of those circuits? If you cancel service and sign up immediately would they have the open slot? I know, risky.
Re: Cell tower coverage? (Score:2)
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Can't spell coverage without overage (Score:2)
Seems to me we should also at least mix in cell towers.
Xfinity offers 1000 GB/mo for less than $100/mo. How much does even one-tenth of that (100 GB/mo) from a cell tower cost?
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Xfinity offers 1000 GB/mo for less than $100/mo. How much does even one-tenth of that (100 GB/mo) from a cell tower cost?
$60/month from Sprint on a data only plan.
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The town will have no more wireless to go around until that one user stops.
Then another person can try and connect again.
Need to give everyone 250, 500, 1000 down speeds from one tower in the community?
That going to need some new maths and better physics.
A lot more new towers. Less users per tower. Slower accounts for everyone.
Got free money to build a new network into/for every town?
Of course they know (Score:2)
The FCC Has No Idea How Many People Don't Have Broadband Access
The FCC is just a well-connected arm of the industry itself. They know exactly what lies they have been fed, as much as they were expecting them.
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They probably don't know. I.e., each member of the industry itself has probably no interest in how many people they aren't serving, as long as they have a monopoly of providing service.
And we care because...? (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA, "broadband" means 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps up on a fixed connection. When I woke up this morning, my connection was much slower than that (although I'm supposed to have 300 Mbps down as I type now. But I digress.).
I wonder how we decided this was a useful metric. Why is 25 good but 24 bad? Ditto wired versus wireless? I happily lived streaming video, teleconferencing, using IP telephony, and all manner of things with much less than 25 Mbps. Hell, I used to be happy with 1.5 Mbps. As others have written, downloading a 1 GB Linux ISO or game image was pretty sluggish but you don't get everything in life.
Perhaps we should have the DoT report how many households are served by roads I can drive 65 MPH on. I can't do that on my street. I can get to a freeway 4 miles from my home (but due to traffic, I'm not sure I can ever actually drive 65 on it.)
Re:And we care because...? (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder how we decided this was a useful metric. Why is 25 good but 24 bad? Ditto wired versus wireless? I happily lived streaming video, teleconferencing, using IP telephony, and all manner of things with much less than 25 Mbps. Hell, I used to be happy with 1.5 Mbps.
You have to draw a line to have a metric. And this is for households, not individuals - so you have to account for multiple simultaneous users. And the big one, quite a few countries - even poor ones - have much better broadband coverage under these same definitions.
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And then you measure that line [wikipedia.org] using the metric to get the actual number, and hopefully a distribution.
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You're in dire need of a disambiguation. [wikipedia.org]
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There's the problem. The FCC doesn't use metric, they use imperial.
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You have to draw a line to have a metric.
That's fine. Why is 25 the line? Why not 24? Why not 26 or 3?
Perhaps this got debated and there's an objective basis for it. I personally have not heard that. Having a metric like 25 just screams to me someone wanted create market demand and/or subsidy program for this 25 Mbps modem they happen to sell.
(Fun story about the Clean Air Act. Apparently one of the requirements was for coal-fired power plants to install exhaust scrubbers. Sounds good, right? Except once a plant installed a very expensive scrubber
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The world is just too complex to summarize like that. By turning a single statistic into a headline we're ignoring huge amounts of complexity and nuance.
The thing about this figure is that it's supposed to be a minimum of sorts.
And this figure as a minimum is deemed to cover a lot of bases.
One of the bases is the future use of that bandwidth.
If bandwidth is not available to a large enough part of the population it will hamper the growth of new services using that bandwidth. So in some ways its a chicken-egg problem.
My personal experience is that i stopped noticing an increase in usability of the internet somewhere between 20 and 40Mbps down. Tho now i h
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The thing about this figure is that it's supposed to be a minimum of sorts.
I believe you're correct. We're supposed to use this metric as a very simplified way of indicating whether someone has internet access or not. I just thing that's way too simple a way of looking at it. For example, you really need to look at how many people live at the home, what their desired network use cases are, how much they'd be willing to spend for those uses, and probably a flock more. My mother-in-law for example doesn't have internet access and has absolutely no desire for it. My dad does have net
Re: And we care because...? (Score:2)
It's probably the bitrate for 720p30 MPEG-2 rounded up to the nearest 5Mbps
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Why the fuck would they still use MPEG-2 to measure anything in 2019? We've been using H.264 for what, a decade now?
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Why the fuck would they still use MPEG-2 to measure anything in 2019?
Because its essential U.S. patents have expired as of February 13, 2018,* and those of H.264 have not. And because ATSC broadcast television and lossless captures thereof still use MPEG-2.
* A handful of MPEG-2 patents subsist in Malaysia and Philippines until late 2019.
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I see that as part of the solution. Force them to upgrade to H.264 and we'll save roughly 50% of the bandwidth they use.
Who pays for AVC converter boxes? (Score:2)
The migration of U.S. broadcast television from analog to MPEG-2 was done under a converter box coupon program funded by the FCC's "sale" of the 700 MHz band to Verizon Wireless. How would you fund the converters needed to migrate from MPEG-2 to H.264?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebboO52In1w
MPEG2 is CHEAP to decode. Seriously, seriously cheap.
H.264 is not as cheap to decode. Even when using dedicated hardware CODECs... MPEG2 is just easier, thus cheaper.
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Hold on a uick look at wikipedia show atsc and analoge can coexsist on the same frequency (ehm have i got this wrong?)
I'm pretty sure it's either-or. I do not recall really any of the details, but IIRC a broadcaster could switch or not, and if they switch they have the option to break up the broadcast how they want. ISTR that most broadcasters opted for more channels, so they compressed the shit out of their HD streams and they look like crap. But I haven't watched broadcast TV in absolutely ages. I live in the sticks, and before this I lived in some different sticks, so there's been no point.
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The standards for the FCC were not written in 2019. These bureaucracies takes years to figure anything out, they can't reasonably be expected to stay ahead of the technology.
The increases in resolution and framerate kind of cancel out when you switch to a more efficient codec. I think H.264 at a similar bitrate you can get 1080p60, which is what we expect anyways.
The FCC would have been aware of ATSC 3.0 by at least 2017. That one uses HEVC which offers substantially more compression than MPEG-2. I wonder i
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It's probably the bitrate for 720p30 MPEG-2 rounded up to the nearest 5Mbps
Not a bad thought but I don't think so.
MPEG defines the format and decoding algorithm. (To be pedantic, no it doesn't. It describes the very limited resources you can assume a decoder has. The stream you create must be decodable using only those resources. It also defines how the arithmetic must be performed including rounding. How you actually do it is your problem. Writing valid encoders and decoders is endless fun.) There's a ton of flexibility in bitrates. In theory you could probably compress 720p down
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Which means ASDL is not Broadband which is all that a lot of rural areas have for wired connections.
By the time most people have 25Mbps they will likely have a new metric for "broadband". And it still will not really matter.
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If you knew what speeds they got in Japan and South Korea, and at what price, you'd probably cry your eyes out.
Had a friend in Japan that told me. She was rather shocked at our situation in the US.
I don't know anyone in South Korea, but I have heard that they are similar to Japan in service and pricing, so take that with a grain of salt.
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Wireless has a far slower sustained speed (Score:3)
Why is 25 good but 24 bad?
In order to dodge the heap paradox [wikipedia.org], those making the definition have to draw the line somewhere. A household's worth of HD streams might be one benchmark.
Ditto wired versus wireless?
Wireless has far smaller caps on the whole.
Wireless Internet, be it satellite or terrestrial, is a shared medium designed to work with bursty traffic. Thus it tends to come with quota policies that impose a far slower sustained speed in bytes per month than wired. Take Xfinity Internet, a cable ISP operated by Comcast, as an example. Its Internet plans all
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In order to dodge the heap paradox [wikipedia.org], those making the definition have to draw the line somewhere.
Completely off topic, but...
This paradox is what you get when one thinks too much, or rather when one abstracts out the physical nature of what one's describing without realising that they're using a physical description. Pure maths, or setting number boundaries is not the solution to the heap 'paradox', common sense is. If a grain (of sand) is resting solely on other grains you have a heap (of sand), otherwise you don't.
Otherwise your point stands. Carry on!
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If a grain (of sand) is resting solely on other grains you have a heap (of sand)
I agree 100 percent in the case of literal heaps of sand beginning with the start of the second layer. So how would we find what makes a "layer" of broadband?
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I pay for 18 Mbps but actually get 22-24 in practice. That's more than enough for most people I think (especially if you can control the kids and their internet usage), and higher perhaps than the baseline should be. At that speed, web pages load very fast (the primary thing most people are on the internet for), you can stream a normal HD television program at the same time and still have lots of bandwidth leftover. But that said, there are MANY places that have no hope of being that fast, even within inco
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Distances? What POTS can do after a kerb upgrade?
The USA has to set a number. 25 is such a number and everyone can be supported to get it.
Want a better number? Set up community broadband. Bring 1000 to everyone.
For more coverage, see... (Score:2)
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Next Steps ... (Score:1)
So a survey was commissioned by a Cabal of communications companies to show that "broadband" penetration sucks.
The next step is obviously that these companies that have formed the Cabal will petition the Government for some additional tax revenue so that they can "fix" the situation.
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The next step is obviously that these companies that have formed the Cabal will petition the Government for some additional tax revenue so that they can "fix" the situation.
Again
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FCC already fixing it (Score:2)
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So what? (Score:1)
I mean really, is it required that the US federal government know everything about everything?*
Why would/should I care if some person in West Bumfuck, USA does/doesn't have broadband?
Because either I have enough connection for my needs (in which case I don't care) or I don't, in which case then I need to decide what cost/inconvenience I'm willing to suffer to get better internet?
Ultimately, it's MY DECISION.
And if you have a different situation, different set of priorities, etc - then you make that decision
Compare the Rural Electrification Act (Score:2)
Why would/should I care if some person in West Bumfuck, USA does/doesn't have broadband?
For the same reasoning behind the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 [wikipedia.org].
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but that was about loans to electric companies that were paid back
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I should care that they have broadband so some politician can justify a multibillion dollar program to buy their votes? That's not terribly persuasive.
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In this case, yes. The telcos were given tax money to provide broadband service to rural dwellers, and, essentially, stole the money. But you can't even task them for it if you can't measure what they actually did.
Always Watching, Always Wanting More (Score:2)
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Everyone and everything is interconnected. When large numbers of people are excluded the system is less efficient and resilient.
If I had the ability I would cut off your water, gas, electricity, fire and police protection, access to all medical and emergency services, electronic communications, and food that you couldn't get yourself.
Then after a year, if you w
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"If I had the ability I would cut off your water, gas, electricity, fire and police protection, access to all medical and emergency services, electronic communications, and food that you couldn't get yourself."
Of course, the glaring flaw in your argument? I PAY FOR ALL OF THOSE THINGS NOW.
So yes, I do it at one remove but by paying market prices, I *am* getting those "for myself".
And the other logical flaw in your argument (or outright deliberate lie, you choose) was "when large numbers of people are exclu
We all know what this means... (Score:1)
The FCC and broadband providers will say "Oh no! The problem is worse than anyone knew!"
And the surcharge on all our bills for providing broadband access to rural places, where these people decide to live, will go up. All our bills will increase as a result. There will be no other result unless we're lucky and this is simply ignored. I'm tired of paying for other people's lifestyle.
I lived in one of those rural areas for over 4 decades. Managed fine even if i was below the threshold. Actually I was fo
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So everyone gets equal amounts of free network neutrality. Network neutrality good.
Rural places bad.
Unless they support network neutrality.
This is still deeply biased and untrustworthy (Score:2)
Business Penetration important too... (Score:2)
I was surprised when a friend’s business within Los Angeles County only had the option of 10Mb DSL. They could get cable extended to them for $20,000 build-out for ~50/10Mb, but anything faster would be over $100k and $800/month. (They needed about 50/25Mb to provide some semblance of customer WiFi plus run their practice management software.)
The cause? Utility undergrounding! New buildings were provided connections to the main street in front, while old buildings on the block had service overhead
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The kerb is too long?
Re "gigabit-ready” That would require the political will to do deep trenching.
CA is still trying to work out how to map and then clean the streets.
Trenching is just another project on a list for more free spending..