EP 58: The Map Is Wrong
The FCC's map of broadband availability in the U.S. is a basis for policymaking, funding decisions and planning to close service gaps for communities. But what if we told you that map, as many can testify, is pretty inaccurate? How? Why? What's the fallout, here? As fast internet service increasingly solidifies itself as necessary infrastructure, it's vital we have accurate data to shape our policymaking and funding decisions. So what's going on here? We dig in on this episode. (Stick around, too, as we have updates on past episodes that you guys pitched.) FCC broadband map https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/ Doug Dawson's "Pots and Pans" blog https://potsandpansbyccg.com/ Municipal Equation EP 47 "Leaping the Digital Divide" http://municipalequation.libsyn.com/ep-47-leaping-the-digital-divide N.C. Broadband Infrastructure Office https://www.ncbroadband.gov/ NCLM report, "Leaping the Digital Divide" https://www.nclm.org/broadband
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. You know, it started when the FCC was given the mandate by congress that they had to try to make sure that everybody in the country had access to broadband.
And that affects literally billions of dollars every single year. I mean, the better data we have,
the better impact we can have on those that are unserved or don't receive service. You know, and it's ridiculous because there's a whole lot more places that don't have broadband than that are shown on those maps. When the FCC puts out inaccurate data about broadband access in The US, there are consequences.
Policy making, funding, economic growth, and more are tied to this data. If it's so important, why is the info inaccurate? And what can we do about it? My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns adapting in the face of change from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Episode 58. And stick around after the main segment for updates on past episodes that you guys pitched. One of the updates is pretty substantial.
We know that there there's estimates that there's 11,000,000 people in cities who don't have good broadband, you know, because, you know, there's an apartment building the cable company never built to, and they don't have any broadband. There's a whole lot of places like that, and they they're just forgotten about. You know? But, you know, the map is never gonna show that kind of stuff, so That's telecom expert Doug Dawson. He runs a consulting firm on the topic called CCG Consulting,
and he's got decades of experience. What you just heard was a snippet of a conversation I had with him a few months ago about how the FCC is using inaccurate data on broadband access in The US. You heard him mention a map at the end. The map is never gonna show that kind of stuff. Stop. The FCC has what looks to be a detailed map of who has access to broadband. Like, if you look at it, it'll show you whether a certain neighborhood has broadband service, how many companies offer service, and at what speeds. And this is the kind of data that funding decisions or policy making could be based off of. But increasingly, people are looking at this map and saying, wait a minute, this data is wrong. It says I have multiple options for broadband service at 100 megs, but I don't have anything like that. Some people don't have broadband access at all, yet the map says they do. Because this data, this map, is tied to funding and policy making, and because fast and reliable internet is increasingly becoming essential infrastructure for all of us, this is a big problem. You know, and it's ridiculous because there's a whole lot more places that don't have broadband than that are shown on those maps.
And so, you know so so the people that get lucky enough to pass through the maps that they're gonna show to not have it might get some broadband through that process. Other piles of people who show they have broadband but don't, they'll be bypassed by it. I mean, nobody will ask for the funding and nobody will come and and provide broadband there. And so it, you know, so it has it has an implication that way because that drives all of the money. It drives federal grants, federal loans, state grants, all that kind of stuff. The maps are the determiner of who gets and doesn't get the money. It also at a bigger level drives the policy because the FCC can go, here's how many houses have access to broadband. Aren't we doing great? You know, when in fact,
we all know that it's way less than it would have shown on the map. To really simplify the conversation, the FCC map, for anybody who doesn't know, would of course answer the question, who isn't being served with broadband? Who needs that service?
And that affects literally billions of dollars every single year. It also affects schools and libraries. It also affects low income people. That's Blair Levin. I do a number of things at the intersection of broadband policy, capital markets, and technology, including providing analysis to Wall Street institutional investors, consulting services to cities, states, countries,
and small companies. He also works with the Brookings Institution and was former chief of staff to the FCC chair back in the Clinton years.
As well as, working on other projects, to help facilitate broadband connectivity to, certain communities that currently don't have it. Well, so,
and this may be too big of a question, but where are we at with broadband in America right now? It's not too big of a question,
but it's a complicated one in which, I don't think any single answer, suffices. There are certain metrics by which you would have to say The United States is in the most enviable position. Certainly, if one looks at, what I think of as the most important criteria, which is how do people actually use, broadband services. What you would see is with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, etcetera, You know, The United States is by far the dominant country, in terms of developing and and and being the location for the corporate headquarters of these services. And that is no small thing. That's where you wanna lead. If you look at,
speeds and price, we do not lead. For example, the average American pays a higher price for the same or slower speeds than Europeans pay, and we don't lead in new devices anymore. That's Asia. This isn't the first time we've mentioned this on Municipal Equation. Back in episode 47, we jumped into the broadband gap, and how we need to find a way to make internet speeds fast and resilient in communities where there's not much of a market driver for private companies to provide service. Lots at stake. Economic development, small and big business viability, education, healthcare, even agriculture, all dependent on fast internet speeds. You'll recall that we looked at a report that the North Carolina League of Municipalities put out, encouraging public private partnerships to make it so, where the public sector could build the fiber infrastructure, and the private internet companies could run the service. Each side does what it does best, so we can close the broadband gap, and, for example, watch rural communities improve. Just looking at North Carolina alone, as an example, this this kind of thing needs policy assistance, legislative assistance, so we need good data. And the FCC map isn't that, even though we turn to it. So why isn't it good info? You know, it started when the FCC was given the mandate by congress They had to,
they had to proactively try to make sure that everybody in the country had access to broadband. So the FCC looked around. So this is probably 02/2004 that they told them they had to do that. So so they looked around and they said, well, that we don't know really know how to do that, so let's figure out, first off, who has broadband because they never asked questions before. And so they came up and and and if I recall, the original mandate from congress also suggested this map and which, you know, obviously, the industry had been involved in that whole discussion. And so they gave them a big pile of money to hire some big consulting firm, and they created this map. And and so the map ever since has been created and then updated in exactly the same manner in that periodically, all the ISPs in the country have to, by census block, tell the FCC what they have. Of course, you know, there's no penalties for doing it wrong, unfortunately, and there's not particularly strong rules about what you should and shouldn't say in there. So they kinda self report what's in their best interest. Some of them do a very good job. Some of them just flat out lie. They're really like, yeah. This area is covered by four g. Like, no. It's not. I go out there, and my cell phone only sees three g. And they and all these other wires carriers know this exactly. They're like, they know exactly where they have what. So they so they're lying because of that. And whether they're lying to make them look good on these nationwide maps or whether they're lying to stop other people from getting that funding, we don't know. The fact is they're lying. And the FCC is a bit complicit in that these days because they they don't want to have to fix it if if they can swear that it's not broken. But why would the FCC be okay with this, with not collecting good data?
Well, there now politics get into it, so An article earlier this year from Motherboard reported that the data provided by the Internet service companies to the FCC is seldom ever independently verified. These companies don't want to expose data about their competition, or lack thereof, in a certain area. The FCC requires Internet service providers to report twice a year on where they offer Internet access service, and at what speeds that service allows. Because the data are reported at the census block level, and because the FCC allows a provider to count all tracts in that census block as served, even if only one tract actually receives the service, then the reported service levels often appear inflated, compared with the actual service offered on the ground. There's more. Many Internet service providers still report their advertised speeds, rather than the actual speeds customers experience. The reported speeds do not account for slow downs that happen during rush hour, when numerous customers simultaneously use a network. This network congestion occurs with most non fiber broadband technologies. But one perspective Dawson shared with me is that it's actually difficult to get a fully accurate picture. If the Internet service companies aren't going to volunteer honest information, then where do we get that info? Could it be part of some kind of census?
You can't really sample the whole United States very well. I mean, they didn't you know, they don't have the budget. This isn't like the census where they could send out 10,000 people.
What about self reporting? I can look up my speed with one of those speed test websites, for example. You know, where I just click on a button and it takes a measure of my internet speed.
But Dawson was ahead of me on that one too. Speed tests don't work either because the carriers have figured that out long ago. You know, what is the real speed? You know, Charter has what they call boost. For the first thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes, they give you the speed you subscribe to. Right? And that passes the speed test every time. But if you download something real big and you watch it, couple minutes later, it's not coming in nearly that fast because it drops down to the actual speed that they are giving.
I reached out to FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel for perspective, and her office provided me some comments she had made about all this. She's definitely in the group of concerned people. In one statement from February 2018, she said, quote, you cannot manage problems you do not measure. And she was saying that while applauding FCC staff for its work to put the map together, but she said it had some quote, serious shortcomings. How do I know? She said. I looked up my house and can tell you with good authority, it lists service that is not available at my location. You can go ahead and plug in your address, and you might find the same thing. End quote. She even set up an email account, broadbandfail@fcc.gov for people to submit their facts and stories and hardships in getting good broadband service where they live or do business. That same month, the FCC unveiled what was supposed to be a new and improved national broadband map. A press release said, quote, with its advanced features, the new map affords a wealth of data and information that will aid in advancing the FCC's and state and local government efforts to close the digital divide. But, then everybody reported the same problems, that the map was loaded with inaccurate information, and stakeholder groups, which end up being pretty much everybody, got increasingly agitated. Chris Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance was quoted in The Verge in September, as saying there's no reason at this point that the public interest data should be hidden like this. Broadband data is not a fine wine or a cheese. There is no reason to store it in a cave to age, end quote. In August, FCC chairman Ajit Pai was quoted by media including UPI as acknowledging that relying on data from private companies, quote, wasn't good enough. In the same news story, commissioner Rosenworcel said the FCC would correct the maps by adding its own tests. But the complaints continue and they're getting increasingly specific, even from other federal agencies. In September, the government accountability office in a congressional report, said the FCC's data overstates broadband Internet access on tribal lands. These overstatements limit FCC and tribal users' ability to target broadband funding to tribal lands. With such a loud chorus of people pointing directly to a very visible hole we need to fix, it would seem like something we would go ahead and solve. But it goes back to what Dawson said about politics. There's a big push from private companies to protect that information. Plus, there'd be a cost for the work. But could the FCC enforce
accurate reporting with penalties for violations, for instance? No. If they fined them $10,000,000 for that, that would probably get their attention. So so they, you know, they do they always have that authority. They've never threatened anyone about the mapping. Well, that's not in the five part. That's simply in their mandate. They are they are able to make carriers comply with their mandates. I've never heard anyone talk about that.
Well, what about state governments endeavoring to collect better data for a collection of maps that could be laid out nationally? Jeff Searle is the head of the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office, which is a state agency,
and they're doing mapping work. We actually work on the ground with, communities and counties around the state to look at their broadband needs and, and help them develop plans, to partner with private Internet service providers to expand or enhance the broadband, access and availability in their in their communities. If you do believe the data coming out of the FCC that 93.7% of all North Carolinians have access to what they define as broadband or high speed Internet access. Less than 50% are actually subscribing or using that speed threshold or that amount of bandwidth on a regular basis. So that's concerning to us. So we've, started a a collaborative statewide collaborative to try to tackle that issue. A subset of that, issue or if you wanna call it the digital divide is, the homework gap. So k through 12 students who don't have access to Internet at home but are required to do homework that requires Internet access. So we're we've done several initiatives, including a statewide survey, that we'll replicate again this year, this school year, to try to gather more data around that.
The the FCC has its broadband map that has received some criticism. What what are you guys doing that's different? Could you kinda just walk us through the the state's mapping effort? Sure. Yep. What we're doing that's different is
collecting different and various datasets to get a more granular or accurate picture of what's going on in communities and what's going on in the ground. So, for example, the FCC's mapping initiative is mainly to show coverage, general coverage in in an area by the census blocks. So they break everything down by census blocks. In North Carolina, I think there's some somewhere close to 188,000 census blocks. Not all of them have homes in them or or, you know, population based. Some of them are, you know, state state forests or national forest land. But the ones, that do have a population base, the FCC tries to show where there's, coverage by the type of technology that's provided, whether it's, you know, copper lines used for telephone service or whether it's fiber optic cables or whether it's a wireless service. And and that's their general purpose of the of the map. What we're finding is that that map, although it wasn't intended for this purpose, is wholly inadequate for our planning purposes as a state. What we wanna get at is show us exactly the locations within a census block or within a community that, does not have the technology or the adequate infrastructure to to get us or to get those locations to high speed Internet access to the broadband threshold. What we're trying to do is take some different datasets, population per census block data, parcel data. There are some federal programs, grant programs that have given money to Internet service providers to build out to certain locations based on cost. One of those is an FCC, grant program. And, the providers have to provide information on where exactly they are going with that money. So we have that data we can lay on, overlay. And then we do a couple of different, we may call crowdsourcing or, you know, the old word was surveying, residents or of a particular community. So So we do that in two ways. One, we either work directly with a county or community. We have a standard survey that we've developed based on our experiences, and we will have the community disseminate that or distribute that to all of the households. And then we'll get the results back, of course, and then we'll we'll analyze the data that way and then plot the points on the map where folks are saying they're having problems and then where folks are saying, no. They're they're not having problems. That gives us a better idea of of where the divide is in the community. We can overlay that data with the FCC data to give us, you know, some additional an additional view that may be helpful for planning purposes. And then finally, we, we also developed our an online map, an interactive map where we, are telling folks if you're having problems or if you're if your service provider is saying, oh, you are getting a particular speed or broadband coverage in your area and you're not, then you can go to our website. We wanna make sure that we spend taxpayer dollars wisely, and so any type of method that's more surgically, oriented is is, we think, the best way to approach that, and and we'll get the biggest bang for the buck.
The the most elementary question, just for anybody who hasn't connected the dots yet, why does this matter? Why do we need to map? Why is it important to have the most accurate maps, stakeholders, all that? What what does this all lead to, hopefully?
Well, it all comes down to money and planning, frankly. I mean, the better data we have, the better impact we can have on those that are unserved or don't receive service. Instead of, you know, if you have a general map and and you have money and you want to, provide better service, you could build out to all the homes in the community. So let's say there's a 100 homes in the community. You could just say, okay. Well, here's enough money to build out to all those homes to make sure that they have broadband service. Well, if 50 of them already have broadband service, then we've just wasted money on overbuilding to those areas. Now, generally, I don't like the term overbuilding. To me, when when someone uses that term, it it's code for competition. We we want competition. It drives innovation and affordability. But in many of these markets, we know that there's just not gonna be overbuilding or competition. So if we are in an area where market forces aren't working, there aren't a number of providers that wanna move into the area and provide service, then we wanna make sure that we use our money smartly. We also wanna be able to make sure, that these areas or these homes are available for federal grant programs. And one of the problems currently with the mapping is that, it's general enough where an entire county may show service at a particular level and the, either the US Department of Agriculture, which has a rural broadband grant program, or the FCC, which has several subsidy grant programs, will look at that area and go, oh, well, you don't qualify. And so if we had a better data mapping, we could say, well, actually half of the county doesn't have service, so half of the county should qualify. And so that's, that's the primary objective of getting better data and a better map. And then of course planning purposes, just, just to help the communities plan better. Many of them have a vision for their community that looks out into the future. They understand that connectivity, high speed connectivity, reliable connectivity, affordable connectivity to the Internet is key to their economic growth, to their education system. That's another major objective for having better data and better maps.
Some folks also point out that a better led effort to connect American households to fast and reliable Internet based on well collected data can increase government efficiency as well and in turn boost overall favorability ratings. We'll go back to Blair Levin for the final word.
We can lower the cost and improve the effectiveness of delivering essential goods and services if we get everybody on. But, essentially, government as an enterprise has to run on both a digital and an analog platform, and that adds to the cost of government and decreases its effectiveness.
Okay. So as you're aware by now, we're back, and it's been a few, speaking about new episodes. Why the delay? Why the the the downtime? Well, big internal projects and a couple weeks of vacation for me that involved my marriage. So I'm gonna go ahead and say that's a decent excuse to take some time off the podcast, but I'm sitting on some episodes and interviews I need to edit, and they'll be rolling out soon. And it's really good stuff. I promise. At least one of the topics was pitched to me, and it's great. I can't wait to roll it out. If you'd like to pitch a topic for this podcast, by all means, love that. And speaking of, before we go, I do have updates on past episodes that were pitched to me by listeners or associates. And here's a big one. You'll recall, or at least I hope you'll recall, back in early twenty seventeen, this would have been episode 16, we did a piece on a local police department's experiment with sketching a suspect based on what a DNA sample could tell us about what that suspect probably looked like. Here's an excerpt. From that DNA.
So, this week we released images for a suspect based on a DNA sample that we had received. Wow. So we have the complete profile of what the guy looks like, the color of his hair.
Yeah. I mean, it's just it's So that was the case of the Ramsey Street rapist in Fayetteville, North Carolina. A string of terrible serial crimes that happened from 2006 to 2008. That voice you heard was Nat Robertson, the mayor at the time. Again, that episode aired in January 2017, and Fayetteville, at the time, was one of very few police departments in The US, using DNA technology, to render computerized sketches of suspects. Like taking the DNA sample, putting it into a machine, the machine spits out an image of what that DNA says that person looks like.
Well, this summer decade, but the man known as the Ramsey Street rapist is now in jail according to police. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Deborah Morgan. And I'm David Crabtree. Police worked with the US Marshals Service to arrest Darryl, Donald Bowden.
He is now in jail under a bond of $18,800,000.
Investigators say they demanded that An arrest is not a conviction. I have to point out, but here's the rundown. And to give you a sense of the excitement this generated, I'll quote not from the excellent local newspaper, but from the national level, at the Washington Post. The Post reported that the Fayetteville Police Department arrested and charged a suspect, a 43 year old man, in the decade old case, a guy named Darryl Wayne Bowden. According to local media reports, his friends and family were stunned. Just didn't think he had the capacity to be a serial rapist. But what led up to the arrest was genetic genealogy. So back in episode 16, we told you that the Fayetteville PD sent a DNA sample of that suspect to Parabon. That's the company that did the DNA based sketches of what that suspect might look like. The sketches alone didn't turn up anything conclusive in terms of, you know, finding a suspect that really fit that picture. But what the police department did was try genetic genealogy with Parabon, which referenced open source DNA records and family tree info available online, to see if they could find an individual in the system that lined up. To quote Lieutenant John Sommerndyke, who we spoke with last time: They did their magic with it. We were able to obtain his DNA, get it off to the state crime lab, and we got a match. We got the guy. So I got up with Lieutenant Sommerndyke the other day for an update, and he pointed out that this case is pending, so it's obviously not appropriate for him to comment any further about it, But he did say this, I can say that genetic genealogy testing done by Parabon on this case, directly led to the arrest of the Ramsey Street rapist. GG testing is a game changer in the cold case community, as now all cold cases have a second chance at being solved. Chief Hawkins, our current police chief, was so impressed with the results that she approved GG testing for three more unsolved rape cases. That's Lieutenant John Sommerandyke, Fayetteville Police Department. I'll have a link to the original episode in the show notes to this episode at municipalequation.libsyn.com. Okay. One more update real quick, a lot more recent, episode 51, where we looked at the local media landscape and areas where newspapers have gone away and there's no one covering city hall, for example. We focused on what that meant and not just from a government watchdog angle. You know, what about when a local government, whether municipal or county, needs to get information out to residents, to business owners. Not everyone is in the habit of reading press releases or attending city council meetings. So what's up when local news coverage dies? Well, Kate Queram at Route fifty, Kate's a former colleague of mine, actually really good reporter. She had a story on October 20, highlighting a report that came out looking at the landscape of local news coverage. I'll just read you the first little part of this route fifty story, and I'll encourage you to read the rest again from Kate Elizabeth Quarram at route fifty. She writes more than one in five newspapers shut down in the last fifteen years, leaving half of the country's 3,143 counties with only one newspaper, typically a small weekly, to cover dozens of communities. According to new research from the University of North Carolina's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, quote, The United States has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2,004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies, says the expanding news desert, a year long study released this month. The loss of local journalism ripples through a community, leading to less independent governmental oversight and lower levels of civic engagement. A 2011 report from the Federal Communications Commission found that local newspapers are adept at breaking down the major issues confronting communities and giving residents the information needed to solve problems. Goes on to say, but in many communities, the economic support for news gathering has dwindled. The UNC report notes that many areas lack the digital or print revenue to pay for the kind of public service journalism that newspapers provided. Therefore, the fate of communities and the vitality of local news, whether delivered over the Internet, airwaves, or in print are intrinsically linked. End quote. So go read the rest. There's a lot more in the Route 50 piece, which I will link to in the show notes with this episode at municipalequation.libsyn.com. Libsyn is spelled L I B S Y N. I want to hear your thoughts on all of this. The FCC broadband map, genetic genealogy and DNA sketching, local newspapers drying up. Any thoughts on any of this, bbrown@nclm.org is my email. At muniequation is my handle on Twitter. Thanks for listening. And regarding the FCC, another gigantic issue we can't solve or hit all angles of in a simple podcast episode, but hopefully you found this information useful. And if this is a topic you've heard about, you know, from the periphery, I hope we did it justice for you and answered your questions. If you want to add an angle or if you have follow-up questions, you can email me. Again, bbrownnclm dot org. And thanks for your patience and the downtime here, otherwise known as the downtime that never was. We've got lots more ahead and of course feel free to pitch episodes. Always welcomed. We'll talk to you next time. This is Ben Brown.
