Industry Pans Plan to Expand Broadband Data Gathering; Regulators Urge ‘Granular’ Review

Industry answered in the negative. “The record in this proceeding confirms that the Commission should focus its attention on streamlining its Form 477 data collection process and minimizing the associated burdens -- not mandating unnecessary and burdensome new reporting requirements on providers,” Verizon and Verizon Wireless said in their comments. “The Commission already has available to it voluminous data concerning the communications marketplace, both from its own, recently expanded Form 477 process and from other available public and third-party sources.” Verizon and other industry commenters urged the commission to use data from the NTIA and the Census Bureau if it’s curious about the broadband marketplace. Efforts to gather data on “actual” broadband speed, for instance, are “infeasible,” something which the commission ought to have learned “through its Sam Knows project,” Verizon said. “Rather than requiring the reporting of metrics that do not exist or that cannot be readily measured, the Commission should continue working through its ongoing proceedings to better glean information concerning speeds of wireline and wireless broadband services,” Verizon said. “Until those efforts are complete, it is too soon to say that useful standards for measuring ‘actual speeds’ will emerge, much less standards that would lend themselves to a data reporting process and that could be derived without excessive burdens.”

T-Mobile said supporters of a wider broadband inquiry “fail to recognize the obvious differences between wireless and wireline service.” “To state the most obvious,” T-Mobile said, “mobile phones move, and thus, unlike fixed service, the subscriber has no true ’service address’ that defines where he or she can receive service,” T-Mobile said. “In the face of that reality, while it might make some sense to collect detailed service or billing address data as a proxy for coverage of a wireline network, it makes no sense to evaluate the coverage of a mobile wireless network by reference to the billing addresses of subscribers.” Those who lobby to find out “actual” speeds “ignore the engineering realities of wireless service,” T-Mobile said. After all, “wireless signals must travel over the air … and are dependent upon handset antenna quality and a host of other factors,” T-Mobile said.

But precise data is essential to local officials who are trying to close the “broadband gap,” D.C. and New Jersey regulators said. The adoption rates in D.C.’s poorest and blackest wards “were below” 40 percent, “while adoption rates in the other Wards fall in the 80-100 percent range,” D.C. Public Service Commission General Counsel Richard Beverly said in reply comments. The NTIA broadband map can’t help there, Beverly said. “In order to expand the availability of affordable broadband services and to close this digital divide, it will be essential for District policy makers to have timely and accurate information on broadband service deployment and adoption rates at a granular level.”

The FCC should also revive the Automated Reporting Management Information System to help put teeth in its data-gathering, NASUCA and New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel said in joint comments. “Reliable, timely data improves the efficiency of market transactions and contributes to sound policy making at state and federal levels,” NASUCA Telecom Committee Chair David Bergmann, Ohio Assistant Consumer Counsel, said in the comments. “The FCC, as a government agency with limited resources, should not be compelled to go chasing after information on providers’ websites, private analysts’ reports and elsewhere,” Bergmann said. “Instead, carriers that operate in the multi-billion dollar telecommunications industry should submit data directly to the agency that has the authority and responsibility to regulate them.”