House Republicans, Public Interest Groups Criticize FCC’s Broadband Measurement Program

The agency plans to release two mobile broadband reports in 2013 -- one examining “consumer experience,” and one “special interest study” to be defined Q1, officials said at a Wednesday meeting at the commission on the speed measurement efforts. The ISP group will also assess mobile network integrity via a series of tests designed to collect information on “network topology,” said Chief Walter Johnston of the Office of Engineering and Technology’s Division of Electromagnetic Compatibility. He has “high confidence we can make hundreds of thousands of consumers part of this effort,” he said. That’s especially with a stronger outreach program buoyed by carrier support, he said.

Majority leaders in the House Commerce Committee said they were concerned the FCC and NTIA gave $1 million in stimulus funds to a foreign-based company to test the broadband speeds of wireline ISPs. The House Republicans’ letters sent Tuesday urged FCC and NTIA members not to “compound” their mistake by expanding the scope of the speed testing program to wireless services in the U.S. The letters were signed by Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich.; Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore.; Lee Terry, R-Neb.; and John Shimkus, R-Ill. (http://xrl.us/bntd7v). The letters described how FCC and NTIA awarded a $1 million contract with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to U.K-based SamKnows to do broadband speed tests. The members asked FCC and NTIA officials to justify “sending Americans’ hard earned money overseas for a project that didn’t put any Americans to work, especially in the current fiscal climate.”

The FCC and NTIA should not move forward with their plan to expand speed testing to wireless services because the results are subject to the variables of a constantly changing spectrum environment, the letters said. “What reason do we have to believe this endeavor will be any more valuable? If anything it will likely be even less meaningful in light of technical challenges.” The commission’s one-year contract with SamKnows to see how wireline ISPs’ advertised transmission speeds compare with actual speeds expires at year’s end, with a renewable option for 2013 (CD Sept 20 p2).

The FCC was “mystified” by the Republicans’ attack, commission spokesman Neil Grace responded by email: “The Measuring Broadband America initiative is a powerful example of the pro-market, pro-competition benefits of information disclosure: Low performers in the first year’s report responded by investing in significant network upgrades that drove major improvements in performance and faster speeds for millions of Americans, which creates jobs both directly and indirectly.” The Recovery Act required NTIA to make a transfer of funds to the FCC for “development of the National Broadband Plan” and the DTV transition, NTIA spokeswoman Heather Phillips said. “NTIA also procured some FCC services to develop the broadband map."

At the FCC ISP speed test meeting, Johnston hedged on setting a definite date for release of the mobile report. He expects the mobile project to be “much more complex” than the wireline project. “It’s easier to talk about when it won’t happen than when it will,” he said. Johnston expects it will take three months “at minimum” to analyze the data, and hopes to release a “simplistic but accurate” report by the end of Q3 2013. The commission and SamKnows are still working with carriers to determine what specific information to collect, he said. Current plans include measurements of downstream and upstream throughput, latency, packet loss, Web browsing performance, cell tower location, ID and signal strength, phone type, and roaming state, officials said. “This is a wish list of things we'd like to have access to,” Johnston said.

The commission, carriers and telcos also discussed their plans for future wireline tests, which will shift from verifying that consumers are getting the speeds ISPs promise, to “tracking the evolution of consumer broadband performance,” Johnston said. SamKnows representative Alex Salter seemed excited at the prospect of tracking all sorts of different data using the “white boxes” already installed in homes throughout the country.

After months of wrangling, the measurement group agreed on details of the proposed disclaimer language to accompany the release of future broadband measurement data. The disclaimer notes that although the FCC released all data collected through its program as part of a raw unaudited data set, only the one month of data used for the official reports is subject to rigorous verification. The other data, which does not undergo as rigorous testing and validation, are “not suitable for FCC use in comparing ISP performance,” the disclaimer will say.

The civil liberties groups that wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Wednesday want greater disclosures about the data being collected, and an explanation that the commission provides the information to law enforcement “without any due process or judicial scrutiny,” they said (http://xrl.us/bnte8e). The FCC’s wireline and mobile broadband data sets, combined, will not only be useful for broadband analysis and testing, but “may also become a ‘honeypot’ for unrelated government uses,” they said. Johnston said that in the mobile program, the FCC wanted to ensure that it was maintaining best practices with regards to a privacy code of conduct to “ensure that the consumer is both fully protected and fully informed."

During 2013, the commission is looking forward to several potential “special interest studies,” commission officials said. Such studies will include end-to-end testing focusing on the performance of users’ Wi-Fi networks, and testing on legacy modems and applications. The basis of the program was to verify the accuracy of ISP advertised claims, Johnston said. Now that that’s confirmed, the focus will shift to “tracking the evolution of consumer broadband performance,” he said. Gaining “statistically valid knowledge” is important to inform the commission and provide better information to the consumer, he said. “We'd like to restructure the purpose of the program to be more of an infrastructure tracking program.”