The FCC released a report in January that shows that the cellular networks of the major carriers underperform in rural America. This is no news to anybody who lives and works in a rural county. The tests allowed the FCC to conclude that the national coverage maps for 4G LTE are largely fiction in rural America.

The FCC conducted 25,000 tests in twelve states to verify the coverage maps of Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. The majority of tests were done in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, Alabama and Montana. Speeds were tested from both stationary locations and in a moving vehicle. AT&T and Sprint weren’t tested because the maps they provided to the FCC showed only the combined upload and download speeds – something that is meaningless to test. The other three carriers reported what they claimed were actual upload and download speeds, shown separately.

The FCC undertook the testing in response to numerous complaints filed in the FCC’s docket for the Mobility Fund Phase II grants. The intention of this fund was to improve 4G coverage in rural areas with little or no cellular coverage. Smaller cellular carriers and the public complained to the FCC that the cellular data coverage claimed by the large cellular carriers was overstated. Small cellular carriers worried that the overstatements would stop them from asking for funding for areas that need upgrading. Local governments were worried that the overstated coverage meant that their areas wouldn’t see upgrades and they’d be doomed for another decade with poor cellular coverage.

The tests were conducted in areas where the carrier maps showed cellular data coverage. The results of the testing were rather bleak. 16% of all calls tried on Verizon were unable to make a data connection. The failures to connect were 23% on T-Mobile and 38% on US Cellular.

Overall, the three carriers met the FCC’s minimum requirement of 5 Mbps download for 4G only 62% of the time. That was 64% on Verizon, 63% on T-Mobile and only 45% for US Cellular. However, even within those reported results, the testers said that they experienced intermittent dropped calls on all three networks.

The FCC responded to these tests by revamping the reporting of cellular data speeds in the future, asking for far more granular speed data by location. The FCC also convened a group of experts to recommend to the FCC how to better test cellular speeds. Finally, the FCC issued an Enforcement Advisory on the accuracy of the cellular data on form 477. That’s a step short of issuing fines and likely will have little impact on the carriers. It doesn’t appear that any of them have pared back their national coverage maps that still claim coverage across most of rural America.

There are significant real-life implications of overstated cellular coverage maps. Just like with the RDOF grant program that will rely on faulty maps of landline broadband, poor maps of cellular coverage mean that many areas with overstated cellular coverage won’t be eligible for federal grants to help fix the problem.

The big downside is that many rural households have no 4G LTE coverage, or at best have slow and intermittent 4G data available. These are often the same areas where landline broadband is slow or non-existent. As hard as it is to live without good cellular coverage or good landline broadband, homes without both are cut off from the rest of the world. To make matters worse, there is still 3G coverage in a lot of rural America and all of the carrirs have plans to cut that dead over the next few years.

The FCC has revamped the Mobility Fund II grant program by doubling the amount of funding to $9 billion and renaming it as the 5G Fund. That’s a silly name because the goal of the program is to bring at least minimal 4G coverage to rural areas, not 5G. Remember that the grant program was originally aimed only at areas that showed no coverage by the carriers. Ideally the FCC would also  direct funding to the many areas where the carriers were lying about their coverage – but It’s doubtful that they have any meaningful maps of real 4G coverage.