/ Unsplash license / Morgan Lane
For a long time, American telecom providers did not dare to invest in the construction of new network infrastructure. The experience of South Korea helped to get the issue off the ground. He highlighted the advantages of timely modernization and highlighted the main thing - the need for maximum accuracy in plans for any changes. Both in terms of controlling budget expenditures and ensuring transparent financial benefits for ISPs.
But here there were even more problems than with communication lines. State programs and investments in this area are calculated based on the minimum connection characteristics for individual households and statistics on the coverage of regions of the country with broadband access. As soon as it came to analyzing the state of the infrastructure, it turned out that the current standards and metrics were outdated , and broadband maps did not allow detailed development plans.
Such statistics are not good
The accuracy of data on the availability of broadband access in certain locations in the United States leaves much to be desired. There, it is customary to define statistics for census blocks - fixed geographic units. More than 10 million blocks of various sizes have been identified in the country, more than half are in settlements. So, in the state of Utah, the area of one of them is 2452 km 2 , others - may be several times smaller - up to 2787 m 2 .
Providers report to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for each census unit where they provide services. In turn, the commission believes that the block can be considered as having broadband Internet access if at least one household has a connection. This approach does not allow a number of states to qualify for participation in large-scale infrastructure development programs - the state considers them to be sufficiently wealthy. Although targeted checks of statistics show that in practice, out of several thousand households included in the broadband map of the communications commission, 19% may not have access to high-speed Internet.
Can't resist, take the lead
42 million US citizens have difficulties with broadband access , but until recently the FCC was in no rush to change the system for collecting statistics and check data from telecoms. Moreover, the process of updating broadband maps has been hampered until recently by the providers themselves.
/ Unsplash license / Thomas Jensen
According to Ars Technica, they have been delaying the transition to a targeted reporting system for years. Even so, they often found themselves on the FCC side with their own reports with erroneous data on thousands of census blocks that had to be corrected.
When the commission moved more aggressively towards clarifying the rules, the heads of some telecom companies began to criticize broadband cards for their poor accuracy. So they tried to seize the initiative as soon as it became clear that funds for the modernization of the network infrastructure could be allocated only for detailed projects.
At the state level, local IT departments joined the map refinement process. In Vermont, one of the civil servants even drove about ten thousand kilometers , registering the quality of the wireless Internet, and then sent a report to the FCC, where they promised to take his data into account.
Whether local authorities will be able to convince the commission of the need for a final revision of the methods by which broadband maps are built and statistics are collected for them remains to be seen. But so far everything goes to the point that the monopolists will again get the most out of the situation.
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