On Tuesday, the FCC released its sixth annual report, as required by law, on the state of US broadband. Their conclusion:”… broadband deployment to all Americans is not reasonable and timely.” This differs from the five preceding reports.
The reason for this agency’s change of mind? The FCC decided— justifiably— to set the benchmark for high-speed Internet access from a piddling 200 Kbps to a somewhat more meaningful 4 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads.
Based on subscriber data released by broadband providers in their Form 477s, the FCC took a fairly conservative approach in their methodology. If subscribers were purchasing a broadband service of at least 3 Mbps download and 768 Kbps upload, then that would count as meeting the new FCC standard.
The FCC assumed that subscribers were not always buying the premium package from the different speed tiers, and so 3 Mbps speeds would most likely indicate the service provider offered a 4 Mbps or above package.
The FCC further assumed that if just a mere 1% of the population in a state county subscribed to a 3 Mbps service, then that meant the county was served by high-speed (above 4 Mbps) broadband. You can quibble with all this, but clearly the report was setting a very low threshold for advanced communications.
But even with this low standard, the report found that 1024 of the US’s 3230 counties are unserved by broadband, for approximately 14 – 24 million residents.
Less than 124 broadband users?
Skimming through the tables of data revealed nothing you wouldn’t have expected: underserved areas were rural counties with low population densities and household median incomes in the $30,000 range.
But there were oddities. Like Menard County, Illinois (population:12,464) with a median household income of over $56,000. I checked the county web site, and Menard seems by all accounts to be a lovely place to live and work. A farm-based economy with over 65,000 harvested acres of corn. Restaurants, hotels, and historic sites. One Abraham Lincoln lived in New Salem before moving to Springfield and then to the history books.
But according to the FCC report, there are less than 124 high-speed Internet users!
What gives? Hmm, maybe I’ll try to ask for some help from the crowd on this one. 🙂
Related articles by Zemanta
- FCC Sixth Broadband Deployment Report (fcc.gov)
- U.S. not getting broadband fast enough, FCC says (cnn.com)
