Microsoft is right. 477 data is notoriously inaccurate and there are few things stopping companies from not exaggerating their coverage.
Basically companies need to reasonably be able to service any address within a census block without a major effort to be able to report that block as covered.
Then if a block is considered to have enough competition providers can’t get funding from various government sources to support their build outs.
To further exasperate the problem it appears the FCC is essentially doing very little validation on the data they are given and subsequently release.
We encountered all of these factors over the past ~5 years building BroadbandNow.com and lobbying the FCC to start collecting better address level data... or to at least minimally validate what they release.
On iur end, with each 477 data release it takes a team of 5 almost 2 weeks to process and merge the data properly. In that process we do a ton of geospatial and some statistical validation to make sure the data actually makes sense. (A CA provider also covers 400 people in Maine??)
We also compare it to historical data sets and a few propritary ones to make our data as accurate as possible. (We’ve also got some other tricks up our sleeve but can’t disclose those).
The only real long term solution is for the FCC to collect and release address level availability data from providers. The providers will rant and rave that this is a regulatory burden but the reality is that most of them already have this data and make it publicaly available if you go through the right channels... this is why we built businessinternet.com. We could easily get our hands on “lit building lists” and even fiber routes for business customers but when you ask ANY major ISP if they have address level coverage for residential customers they’ll tell you their systems aren’t advanced enough to have that data.
It’s crazy.
When we started BroadbandNow in 2014 we did so because we realized there were millions of Americans who we considered “underserved” meaning that they didn’t have more than 2 wires providers that offered 10/4 mbps.
Today we measure that metric at 25/3 but it is sad to say the number of underserved Americans has barely improved. As a team we believe better data improves competition. Hopefully Microsoft bringing attention to the issues around 477 data will create enough political leverage to help fix the issues.
Basically companies need to reasonably be able to service any address within a census block without a major effort to be able to report that block as covered.
Then if a block is considered to have enough competition providers can’t get funding from various government sources to support their build outs.
To further exasperate the problem it appears the FCC is essentially doing very little validation on the data they are given and subsequently release.
We encountered all of these factors over the past ~5 years building BroadbandNow.com and lobbying the FCC to start collecting better address level data... or to at least minimally validate what they release.
On iur end, with each 477 data release it takes a team of 5 almost 2 weeks to process and merge the data properly. In that process we do a ton of geospatial and some statistical validation to make sure the data actually makes sense. (A CA provider also covers 400 people in Maine??)
We also compare it to historical data sets and a few propritary ones to make our data as accurate as possible. (We’ve also got some other tricks up our sleeve but can’t disclose those).
The only real long term solution is for the FCC to collect and release address level availability data from providers. The providers will rant and rave that this is a regulatory burden but the reality is that most of them already have this data and make it publicaly available if you go through the right channels... this is why we built businessinternet.com. We could easily get our hands on “lit building lists” and even fiber routes for business customers but when you ask ANY major ISP if they have address level coverage for residential customers they’ll tell you their systems aren’t advanced enough to have that data.
It’s crazy.
When we started BroadbandNow in 2014 we did so because we realized there were millions of Americans who we considered “underserved” meaning that they didn’t have more than 2 wires providers that offered 10/4 mbps.
Today we measure that metric at 25/3 but it is sad to say the number of underserved Americans has barely improved. As a team we believe better data improves competition. Hopefully Microsoft bringing attention to the issues around 477 data will create enough political leverage to help fix the issues.