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The Internet United States

White House Debuts New Maps Showing Broadband Vacuum (axios.com) 161

Posted by msmash from the for-everyone-to-see dept.
The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. From a report: The White House is pushing for big spending to provide more, better broadband service to underserved areas after the pandemic made Americans more dependent than ever on their internet connections. The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration.

The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection. The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.
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White House Debuts New Maps Showing Broadband Vacuum More

White House Debuts New Maps Showing Broadband Vacuum

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  • Broadband vacuum, you say? (Score:5, Funny)

    by know-nothing cunt ( 6546228 ) on Thursday June 17, 2021 @07:27PM (#61497756)

    That'll get the house clean a lot faster than my old dial-up vacuum!

  • New map, same as the old map... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MetricT ( 128876 ) on Thursday June 17, 2021 @07:31PM (#61497768)

    I just looked up my parent's house. The phone company's local DSLAM is filled with no ports, so no DSL for them. No cable access either. Right now their only choice is Wildblue, and I have a pre-order for Starlink.

    Sure enough, the new map shows their neighborhood as having broadband. Nope. Hell, if ISDN was an option I'd take it.

    Thank God the local electric co-op has been allowed to get into the fiber game. They should have fiber by 2023.

    • GPON is good for residential fiber.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwdb ( 526327 )

      Wonder where we report discrepancies like that. The Ookla report for my own census tract is about right, but the form 477 reporting for our census block is wrong: it suggests we can get fiber when I know we can't.

      I hope this is a sign that the administration is not going to tolerate the fudging of numbers, a la "we reach at least one customer in the area so it's 'available' to the whole region".

      • I've been working on this for about a year for the small town where I live. The short answer is you don't report it. If you're counted as rural you can report it to the USDA (yes the USDA because when the government thought "hmm who knows about rural they said .. aha the cow people). The USDA will tell you their hands are tied because the legislation requires they trust the information they're given and what they're given comes from the ISPs. CenturyLink in the Southwest is really bad about this.

        The

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jonwil ( 467024 )

          And then what you get is that the local dinosaur ISP says "although we don't plan to serve these customers, we aren't going to let anyone else serve these customers either" and finds ways (e.g. getting laws passed at the state level) to block it all.

          • If you have alternate ISPs, particularly local cooperatives or other small companies that are more than willing to swoop in then you just give your shit ISP plus the others an opportunity to bid. The local ISP can't do anything if the procurement process gives them a fair shot.

            They did put up road blocks for small towns that tried to form their own cooperative in states whose laws were murky (North Carolina).

    • Re:New map, same as the old map... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Friday June 18, 2021 @10:04AM (#61498688) Homepage

      And for a lot of the country, there's only one broadband option. I looked up my house and it's not listed as a Broadband Vacuum, but I only have 1 ISP to choose from: Spectrum. If Spectrum decided to raise their rates to $100 a month, decided to block Netflix and Google, or just plain decided to kick me off and permanently ban me from having their service ever again, I wouldn't have any other option. There are no competitors. I might still be able to get DSL (for more money and slower speed), satellite (even more money and low caps), mobile (caps galore), or dial up (hell no), but none of those are viable options for how I use broadband (work + streaming). Without a healthy competition in the ISP market, too many people are left to the whims of a single company and are unable to switch to someone else.

  • I question how valid (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Thursday June 17, 2021 @07:33PM (#61497776)
    the map is. I have family that just moved in to a house in the middle of a red zone and they have better internet than I do here.

    • The map is not valid.
      Shows my house at 1Gbps/35Mbps, which is as offered ('Gigablast' - up to 1Gbps) by the ONLY ISP offering anything above 25/5Mbps in my area and deliver 400-ish/30-ish Mbps on it.
      Cox Comm owns half the city, Warner the other. That's as close to a monopoly as they can legally get these days. Screw these guys.

  • One of the highlighted patches near me has a large low-income housing development in it, so I guess that makes sense.

    However the other highlighted patch near me is the center of a cemetery. Iâ(TM)m really curious to see what data resulted in that.

    • The maintenance trust behind the cemetery. Nobody wants to trench fiber out to the building in the middle through a field of graves.

      • The occupants of those graves donâ(TM)t really need high speed internet. The private cemetery can easily trench via the roads snaking all over the cemetery already. It was opened in the 60s, so itâ(TM)s not like they have to worry about unmarked graves.

        The patch highlighted as underserved is literally the cluster of buildings in the middle dedicated to housing cremated remains. The only rooms there intended for living humans are some custodial closets.

  • ... lower the GD prices!

    • I don't necessarily want lower prices, just keep them the same.

      I get my cable company telling me that they are rolling out new plans. Great! Now my internet is 10 times faster at twice the price. WTF? I never ran into the limits before and now I'm paying double. "But you are getting more! Now you get 11 Gbps. Don't you see? This goes up to ELEVEN, that's like, one more than the other guys."

      I didn't ask for more. I want my costs to stop going up.

      My guess is that they are happy to keep building faste

  • Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 17, 2021 @07:48PM (#61497794)

    My neighborhood has its own census block. The map claims we are offered 1GBps/10Mbps speeds, but that is patently false. The highest terrestrial broadband offered in my census block is 24/2 by AT&T DSL.

    Did some digging, and the map is based on ADVERTISING, not actual speeds. Yes there is a cable company that advertises 1gb to our neighborhood, but if you call and order it, you get the "we don't serve your address" message.

    So government thinks we have broadband, but we don't.

    But that kind of ineptitude is expected and typical of government.

    • Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jwdb ( 526327 ) on Thursday June 17, 2021 @11:12PM (#61498104)

      That's corporate malice, not government ineptitude. We don't fund the govt enough to actually investigate this, so they have to rely on self-reporting. If companies were honest this wouldn't be an issue, but...

      • It's a little bit of both since the government takes corporate donations and, in a totally separate decision *wink* *wink* doesn't look too closely at the figures the corporation is reporting.

      • It can't be both?
        Corporate malice constraining service, sure.
        Government ineptitude at identifying it and reporting it.

        One might in turn say 'it's corporations paying the right people not to notice/investigate' - that's just another confluence of corporate malice and a corrupt/venal/failed government that CAN BE BOUGHT.

    • That's just one indicator. The speed test data is probably pretty accurate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      You get the government you pay for (or the government you let get paid by those who don't represent the interest of actual people, see Citizens United)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kdekorte ( 8768 )
      Same for me, and it is errors like this that actually prevent you from getting better internet. Ugh

    • So, you honest citizen decide to form a non-profit to report ACTUAL internet speeds at reasonable prices for consumers (since people with enough $ can pay to extend service just to themselves.)

      After all the time/effort to get proper numbers and keep that up to date, Biden uses you as the new data source. Then you discover being a single source, every entity that does not like your facts starts threatening you with lawsuits; but you hold your ground. Then you have actual lawsuits which you'll win but only

  • The map shows larger voids because someone at the White House realized that 300 baud dial-up access doesn't count as broadband.

  • Yet another automated, non-curated map with an amazing amount of need shown because of invented criteria that are almost meaningless.

    The Obama era map had 'food deserts' in the strangest places, like San Quentin prison.

    This map would lead one to believe that over 3/4ths of the country has almost no internet access, based on contrived criteria that means nothing

    • I remember that useless map, and the fact that for some bizarre reason it didn't list locally owner grocers or mini-marts. It showed vast swaths of north Texas as a "food desert" despite there being like 7 grocery stores in Denton alone.

      This map seems equally brain dead.

    • The Obama era map had 'food deserts' in the strangest places, like San Quentin prison.

      Sounds like something that meets the parameters (population center with no grocery stores nearby). People don't even want to fund the initial study. It's hard to imagine fighting for funding to then find the flaws and fund the work to correct for them. Certainly this stuff is done by lowest bidding contractors.

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday June 17, 2021 @09:49PM (#61498024)

    Broadband Vacuum

    This IoT crap has gotten way out of hand ... :-)

  • Starlink just filled Biden's map solid. On behalf of Musk - you're welcome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      While StarLink is here in my area, it’s currently closed to new subscribers until they get more satellites up. Estimated end of 2023.

      Where I am, advertised is 16/12 but testing is closer to 12/7. High Speed WiFi. I will say, it’s a perfectly good speed for working from home though. I’m a Unix admin and my wife is a MS SQL DBA.

      [John]

  • Broadband vacuum

    For a second there, I thought the "internet of things" had gone too far ...

  • I call BS. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alanshot ( 541117 )

    I looked at the grid square that covers the office campus I maintain. Ive got multiple redundant gigabit fiber connections, as well as several high speed cable lines. Yet they flag it as a problem area. WTAF?

    But it's to be expected from .gov I guess. They cant get anything right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sk999 ( 846068 )

      My office has multiple 10 Gbit trans-oceanic connections. We shovel lots of data between continents. Also flagged as a problem. Root cause - we don't use a cable company.

    • Does your office campus share internet with the entire county?

      • Does your office campus share internet with the entire county?

        Irrelevant. First of all, its a grid square of a couple hundred acres, not the entire county. (which in this case is the ENTIRE city....which is 400square miles. )

        This is supposed to show (lack of) availability of HIGH SPEED internet. In which it fails. I'm not an ISP so my sharing is not the issue. I'm a consumer just like you. AND my neighbors as well. They too can get the same internet I can .

        I can get gigabit fiber internet, as well as high speed (100x10 cable) from multiple internet providers. And I

        • No it's not supposed to show lack of availability of high speed internet, read the title of the fucking page. If some of your neighbors don't have fast internet that is an indicator of need.

          • No it's not supposed to show lack of availability of high speed internet, read the title of the fucking page. If some of your neighbors don't have fast internet that is an indicator of need.

            How does the lack of purchasing something that exists indicate need? Need would be nobody buying it because its not available. If a store sells haggis but nobody buys it, is that also demonstrating a NEED for haggis? LOL

            My point was simply that the map is flawed due to flawed logic. I know of several pockets in town where there is need because there is no service. (typically because the carrier doesnt want to hassle with crossing a right of way.) But its instead showing areas of "need" simply because they d

  • This map shows that my college campus, where 20 years ago I was maxing out my 100mbps dorm connection downloading The Lord of the Rings (*cough* I mean homework assignments), is a broadband desert with maximum speeds of 10 down / 9 up.

    What junk.

    • A map is a way to visualize data. It does not, however, magically enable dummies to interpret that data correctly. If you went to college and you don't understand this, I must assume you took liberal / fine / performing arts. In that case I hope you're making a nice living as a ballerina, but I suspect your parents may have wasted their money.

  • T-Mobile (and others soon, I think Verizon has it or is coming out with it) has broadband offerings. I just checked my neighborhood and they claim red areas nearby when I in fact just switched to Tmobile and get 200+Mbps down (60 down on a bad day) and 15 or so up, $60 flat no data cap. I'm dropping cox because it's way cheaper.

    They need to add explicit home broadband service (I get not adding "you can use your phone as a hotspot" type broadband) over wireless to their data.

  • We need fiber. Fiber is the future. It's immune to electromagnetic interference, unlike copper, and its potential is greater than satellite / wireless will ever be.

    To add fuel to the fire, China has grown their fiber optic networks much faster than the US has theirs.

    We will still be dicking around, arguing about whether 10 mbps counts as broadband, when they fly past us.

    Personally, I consider anything less than Gigaethernet to not be broadband. You just can't do a lot with low bandwidth / asymmetric.

    I want

  • According to this map, there's no internet access in Canada!

    Wait, how am I able to post this then?!

  • My county shows green on that map, but I average about 10 disconnects a day and I've never seen the rated speeds

  • This map is horrible. I zoom in on my neighborhood and the census blocks listed as not having broadband make no sense. I know for a fact my either neighborhood has fiber optic available. I think it's highly inaccurate just because a couple of old people in a neighborhood don't own a computer it's listed as being not having any service.
     
    Much like ISP maps...this one isn't based on reality.

  • We've had this conversation any number of times.

    Clearly this site is trying to make a case that we should spend taxpayer dollars to pull fiber all over the country so everyone can get 25 Mbps service. Can we agree that's what they're trying to accomplish?

    That's fine. Go ahead and make the case if you want. But this isn't compelling, not yet.

    To be truly compelling, I'd need to see answers to:

    • What can I do with 25 Mbps that I can't do with 20? Or with 10? How important are those things to the people who do

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