Questions Remain as Providers Prepare for New FCC Map Reporting Requirements

As providers prepare for the June 30 opening of the FCC’s reporting portal for its forthcoming broadband maps, some industry representatives and experts said questions remain about what the broadband serviceable location fabric will look like and the kind of information that will be sought once the portal opens. Most agreed the new maps should be ready to be published by the fall, reflecting what FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told House Communications Subcommittee members last week (see 2203310060).

Lawmakers we spoke with before and after Rosenworcel provided the new mapping timeline were hopeful the FCC is working harder to release them this year. They noted increased urgency because Congress required that much of the $48 billion in new broadband money allocated to NTIA in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act remain unavailable until the commission releases the revised coverage data (see 2107210063).

“I sure hope” the FCC makes the new fall deadline, said Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker, R-Miss. The lack of accurate coverage data has been a “block to widespread deployment.” The FCC’s pace “has been a frustration” and lawmakers have been “trying to push them at every pass” given the importance of accurate mapping in effectively distributing federal broadband money, he said. Wicker expressed dissatisfaction with the FCC’s work on the maps last year even before Congress passed IIJA (see 2103170068).

Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told us she’s already “got the details” on current overall U.S. coverage based on information from Microsoft, but “I’m happy to hear more” from the FCC on what its revised maps reveal. It’s certainly important the commission speedily provide more accurate coverage data given the IIJA rider, she said. Microsoft’s data shows large swaths of the U.S. lack affordable broadband access and “that’s what we need to deal with,” Cantwell said. She was one of several committee members who pressed Rosenworcel on the mapping timeline during a November confirmation hearing (see 2111170071).

“Everybody recognizes how important the maps are, and particularly” given its importance to federal distribution of “all this money that’s in the pipeline … to make sure it’s spent well,” said Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D. “That’s been something we’ve been clamoring for a long time and I hope we finally get there” this year. “There are people who will probably resist good mapping if they think that they’re going be disadvantaged by it,” but “most people recognize that if we’re going to do a good job of building out these networks, including in underserved areas, we’ve got to have good maps,” he said.

“The sooner we get” the revised maps out “the sooner we can use the money that we’ve passed” in IIJA “to do what needs to be done,” said House Communications Chairman Mike Doyle, D-Pa. “We simply can’t move forward on that without good maps” in place. “We’d just be throwing money out the window” otherwise, he said.

“We hope those assurances” of a fall map debut prove right, said House Communications ranking member Bob Latta, R-Ohio: The FCC’s “got to get this done” as soon as possible because “we need” the maps to ensure efficient use of NTIA’s IIJA money. “You don’t want to have overbuilding” or unserved areas that don’t get any of the funding, he said. “Our rural areas are really what we’ve got to get to first.”

Details Focus

The “devil will be in the details” as the FCC implements the new maps, said NTCA Senior Vice President-Industry Affairs Mike Romano. The group expects a “relatively smooth transition” for its members as they shift from reporting at a census block level to shape files. Questions may arise when the reporting portal opens, including about the requirement to have an engineering certification, Romano said. “A lot of smaller companies” don’t have on-staff engineers and may need to outsource, he said.

Among the main delays for the FCC were securing a contractor to build the broadband serviceable location fabric, which would map out every buildable location across the country. CostQuest received a contract in November to develop the fabric but couldn’t move forward until the GAO ruled on a challenge by LightBox. The GAO ruled in favor of CostQuest in March, and the FCC has been working to complete and test its broadband data collection system while CostQuest builds the fabric (see 2203110040). CEO James Stegeman deferred to the FCC about the details of CostQuest's work.

The FCC's overhaul of its mapping process is “going to be messy to start” because providers are being asked to “completely reformat the way they report serviceability” and the level of granularity, said BroadbandNow Editor-in-Chief Tyler Cooper. The initial map is “not going to necessarily look a whole lot like the final product,” he said. The FCC has “a lot to do” once it receives providers’ data, Romano said. That includes a “substantial amount of scrubbing,” crowdsourcing and a challenge process, he said. "Our goal is to make the new maps available as soon as possible following the close of the [Sept. 1] filing window," emailed an FCC spokesperson: "With better data we can more accurately target funding and other resources to those areas that need support."

“Any map will have errors in it,” said Technology Policy Institute President Scott Wallsten. The FCC is “setting up one of the tools that’s necessary” for others to analyze the eventual data. Whether the maps can be used right away depends on the questions that individuals want answers to, Wallsten said. The FCC may want to consider making the data it receives publicly available, he said, because it can be checked for errors through crowdsourcing. Wallsten cited as an example TPI’s map, which showed a decrease in 2019 in the number of households in Florida with access to 100/100 Mbps speeds based on Form 477 data. It was the result of “one small provider that claimed to be offering fixed wireless service” at these speeds and “just stopped providing data,” he said.

A lot of questions remain unanswered about how the maps will affect ongoing FCC programs that rely on “legacy mapping data” or NTIA’s new IIJA-funded programs, Cooper said. The FCC's 2021 broadband progress report said nearly 14.5 million Americans lived in areas without access to at least 25/3 Mbps speeds at the end of 2019. “We’ve estimated that that number could be close to double that,” Cooper said, noting BroadbandNow estimated in its own report last year that the actual number may be around 42 million Americans.

The new maps may show more unserved locations than what has been shown with Form 477 data because it will be more granular, Romano said, but “granularity and accuracy are not the exact same thing.” The scrubbing and technical specifications put forward by the FCC “are going to be critical,” he said. The agency may want to consider whether it’s feasible to include a margin of error around its estimate of unserved Americans or conduct statistical sampling, Wallsten said. “I would like them to do it,” he said, but this kind of data collection may be best for the Bureau of Economic Analysis “because they do it for every single other industry in the country.”