WASHINGTON, DC — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been busily offending the sensibility of artists and tolerant broadcasters since Janet Jackson’s nipple shield made an unexpected and insanely brief appearance during the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been keeping itself occupied meddling in other areas whose subtleties it can’t quite grasp, however.After having long been criticized for using flawed measurement tools in its evaluation of broadband saturation within the United States, the FCC chose April 16th to finally admit that it really doesn’t know what it’s doing.
Even the Government Accountability Office has told the FCC that there’s more to the broadband market than an assumption that an entire neighborhood can get broadband from a specific provider if one household within its zip code can. Anyone who’s been told that they’re too far from the closest copper lines knows that’s not true – and that includes eager would be subscribers in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Commissioner Michael Copps has acknowledged that “Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed, and price,” according to eweek.com.
Part of the problem is that the FCC calls anything faster than 220 kbit/s “broadband,” and further boosts the numbers of people supposedly in the fast lane by including cellular broadcast account subscribers. The latter is especially troublesome, as carriers including Verizon Wireless have insisted that the service, which does not allow for video, downloads, or VoIP, is not meant to be a DSL replacement in spite of claims that system usage is “unlimited” for their subscribers.
In order to address these inconsistencies and arrive at a more accurate picture of America’s broadband scene, the FCC has begun a Notice of Inquiry about precisely how equitably broadband services are distributed across the country. Additionally, the agency announced its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which hopes to develop more accurate methods of collecting information required in order to develop proper broadband policy.
This is good news to Copps, who asked FCC Chairman Martin if the agency could “finally agree that something drastic needs to be done,” after observing that the country is 15th internationally for broadband availability, thanks to “commercial and regulatory missteps.”
Copps hopes that a more realistic evaluation of the situation will provide the FCC with answers to “why so many Americans do not have broadband, and why those who do, or think they do, are paying twice as much for connections one-twentieth as fast those enjoyed by customers in some other countries.”
