From all over the country, I’m hearing stories about ISPs who are gaming the FCC broadband maps in order to block area from being eligible for the BEAD grants. It’s relatively easy for an ISP to do this. All that’s needed is to declare the capability to deliver a speed of 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps.
ISPs can largely do this with impunity since there is nothing wrong with them doing this. The archaic FCC rules allow ISPs to claim ‘up-to’ marketing speeds in the maps, and ISPs can self-determine the speed they want to declare.
A lot of ISPs decided to start claiming 100/20 Mbps capabilities in the last update to the FCC maps. This is being done across technologies. We’ve suddenly found rural DSL claimed at speeds of 100/20 Mbps and faster. Older DOCSIS 3.0 cable networks that previously declared upload speeds of 8 or 10 Mbps are suddenly in the FCC maps with 20 Mbps upload speeds. Some WISPs and FWA cellular carriers are claiming speeds of 100/20 Mbps across a large geographic footprint that doesn’t match the capabilities from its tower locations.
It’s not hard to understand the motivation for this. We’ve seen this before. Just before the FCC was to announce the eligible areas for the RDOF reverse auction, CenturyLink and Frontier declared that tens of thousands of Census blocks suddenly had the capability to deliver speeds of 25/3 Mbps. This was the speed in the FCC maps that would have made these areas ineligible for the RDOF auction. The FCC rightfully rejected these last-minute claims. But if the telcos had been less greedy and had declared a smaller number of Census blocks, they may well have gotten away with the deception. The motivation of these telcos was obvious – they didn’t want anybody else funded to bring broadband to their monopoly service territories, even though they were not delivering decent broadband.
The motivation to do this today is identical. When an ISP declares 100/20 Mbps speed capability, the area is removed from BEAD grant eligibility. The ISP operating in that area will have squelched a new competitor from entering the market using BEAD grants.
The ISPs aren’t finished with this effort. I know several communities where the cable company recently knocked on the door at City Hall to say they are going to upgrade the cable networks this year. These communities are expecting that the cable companies will try to kill BEAD eligibility by declaring the upgrades in the upcoming BEAD map challenges being done in each state.
The NTIA’s and the FCC’s response to this issue is that it is the responsibility of communities to police this issue and to engage in the upcoming state BEAD mapping challenges. I can barely talk about that position without sputtering in anger. Most counties are not equipped to understand the real speeds that are available from an ISP. From my own informal survey, I don’t think that even 10% of counties are considering a map challenge.
But even communities willing to tackle a map challenge will find an incredibly difficult time. First, many states only have a 30-day long map challenge process, and some of the challenges are already underway, with many more challenges to start very soon. Communities have to somehow convince customers of the suspect ISPs to take a speed test multiple times a day in a specific manner. That is hard to do under any circumstances, but particularly hard to do considering the short time frame and specificity of the challenge process.
Consider a real-life example of the difficulty of doing this. I know a county where a WISP claims 100/20 Mbps speed for over five hundred homes in a corner of the county. The county purchased trailing 12-months of Ookla speed test data, and there was only one speed test for this ISP in that area in the last year. If the State Broadband Office won’t accept that as proof for a valid challenge, the County can’t convince nonexistent customers to take a speed test.
This feels like another example of the NTIA ‘protecting the public’ by requiring a lot of proof for a map challenge. The fact is that the folks living in rural areas know the ISPS that work and don’t work. If a ISP appears with decent speeds in an area with no good broadband, word of mouth spreads quickly and a lot of people try the ISP. If a new ISP gains almost no customers, they are either making bogus claims of speed capabilities or they have prices that nobody can afford. Market success should be one of the criteria for a map challenge, and States should invalidate claims by any ISP who have only a sprinkling of customers in an area from blocking BEAD grants. Unfortunately, the FCC does not gather actual customer data in the same detail as the FCC maps – they only gather the speeds claimed by ISPs and the supposed capability to connect customers within 10 days.
The bottom line of all of this is that map manipulation is going to mean that a lot of areas will be excluded from the BEAD grants. Counties are ill-equipped to do the map challenges, and even motivated counties will have a hard time mounting a successful map challenge.
I expect my blogs in a few years will be full of stories of the neighborhoods that got left behind by BEAD and which still won’t have an ISP option with decent speeds. I’m predicting this will be millions of homes. Unfortunately, those homes will be scattered, and it will not be enough homes to drive another big grant program. I fear these folks will be left behind, served only by the ISP that exaggerated the speeds in the FCC map. In the case of the FCC maps, it seems that cheating pays.
In total agreement with your analysis. Thought we had this tackled this last year based on broad acceptance of statistically valid analysis of million of consumer-initiated speed tests. A robust approach VERY clearly identifies unserved areas and verifies areas of progress. Such speed test-based methodologies were used by multiple states in their own grant programs and was favored by the NTIA.
Unfortunately, the NTIA elected to switch – under political pressure – to rely solely on the FCC maps. The NTIA Model Challenge Process is, as you note, far too cumbersome for government entities and non-profits to have any significant impact. Instead the BEAD Challenge Process offers ISPs yet another opportunity to block areas from funding by claiming they were already planning to build to specified areas.
To top it off, states are now working on plans for spending BEAD dollars left over after reaching all of the FCC-identified unserved households, despite your correct projection that BEAD will skip millions of unserved locations.
I like this section in your blog
“””The fact is that the folks living in rural areas know the ISPS that work and don’t work. If a ISP appears with decent speeds in an area with no good broadband, word of mouth spreads quickly and a lot of people try the ISP. If a new ISP gains almost no customers, they are either making bogus claims of speed capabilities or they have prices that nobody can afford. Market success should be one of the criteria for a map challenge, and States should invalidate claims by any ISP who have only a sprinkling of customers in an area from blocking BEAD grants.”””
I would suggest, humbly, that we are one of those ISP’s that “work”. And the local people know it. We’ve been in business over 10 years, steady growth, without ever advertising. Wiped out competition in the area that offered poor service and have almost no customer churn. Death or moving away is our largest percentage of lost customers.
We are also one of those ISP’s that put 100×20 on the map intentionally to stop funding. Why? Let me explain. We understand what real people, living real lives, need for bandwidth. As opposed to the hyped numbers from the big ISP’s or media, etc. We started out 10+ years ago offering 10 Mbps. In time we freely upgraded that to 12 and then 25 Mbps. Then we offered a 50 Mbps when people started asking about faster service. To date 75% of our users are still on 25 Mbps, with no complaints, no buffering, happy service. Give me one good reason why we would offer 100 Mbps service in this situation. In time ( and that time is now ) we will/would offer 100 Mbps as demand for it grows. We now have a small number of people on 100 Mbps. Those early adopters are always there, they never use the high speeds, or at least not consistently, but they want it. And we welcome those early adopters because they make great test cases for stress testing the network.
Then along comes the government and says unless you are offering 100 Mbps minimum your clients are suffering from poor internet, we’re going to classify your 10 years of successful business as “unserved” and give millions of dollars to some other company to come overbuild you and show you how to do it right. Really? You have to be kidding me. 10 years of success blowing away the competition that offers faster speeds and being the go to ISP on local report isn’t “success”? We are a greedy ISP taking advantage of our poor customers? I’m sorry, absolutely we are going to put whatever we want on that map to keep that corrupt money out of our area. It’s technically not a lie, we can offer 100 Mbps inside the 10 days wherever we have shown coverage for it. Can we hook everyone up in that area to the 100 Mbps? Yes, do we have enough capacity to support everyone maxing that out? No, neither does any ISP. Over-subscription is the only way this works. So why doesn’t the government focus on that? How oversubscribed is the fiber ISP next door offering 5 Gbps? Probably a lot more than we are. So who is cheating their customers here?
I understand the passion for getting it right this time and rolling fiber to every home in the US so we can be like other countries :eyeroll, but there is blood sweat and tears in great quantities rolled up in small businesses like ours and we are not going to just sit back and let the government steam roll over us. The kind of people that have the will power to start a Wisp from scratch are the last people on earth to be “steamrolled”.
I do strongly support giving money to the giants like AT&T and Comcast. It helps them build better cheaper core long haul fiber that local IPS’s like us can then tap for cheaper uplink rates and offer cheaper faster service to our clients. Those big ISP’s usually take that money under the promise of building out last-mile and then cheat the system and use it somewhere else. Corrupt? Yes. Working model? Yes. We’re reaping those benefits of having relatively cheap uplink options. We currently have 4 separate fiber upstreams on our Wisp. One 10Gbps with a 1Gbps backup and 2 other 1 Gbps in the field. We are in the process of turning up a 10Gbps fiber pop at another location. That makes a very solid Wisp.
Are you using licensed or unlicensed spectrum?
We are 100% unlicensed. 5, 24, and 60 Ghz.
Per Part C of the BEAD NOFO, exclusive use of unlicensed spectrum for FWA is not deemed “reliable broadband service” and thus you would not be able to defend your area as served for the purpose of BEAD funding eligibility:
(u) Reliable Broadband Service—The term “Reliable Broadband Service” means broadband service that the Broadband DATA Maps show is accessible to a location via:10 (i) fiber-optic technology;11 (ii) Cable Modem/ Hybrid fiber-coaxial technology;12 (iii) digital subscriber line (DSL) technology;13 or (iv) terrestrial fixed wireless technology utilizing entirely licensed spectrum or using a hybrid of licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
* * *
WISPs have provided a much needed interim workaround amid the slow and difficult progress in replacing the legacy copper POTS infrastructure with FTTP. But progress marches on. Had this transition to FTTP been properly planned and committed 30 years ago, you wouldn’t likely be in this whipsawed position as wireless advanced telecom wouldn’t have been as prevalent.
@Frederick Pilot totally understand unlicensed is not qualified. Further proves the point that the powers that be are 100% out of touch with reality. And I also understand that *if* the fiber roll out would have been done correctly the wireless industry might not ever have grown to what it is now. But it’s a lot like the IPV4 vs IPV6 situation. IPV6 was supposed to be ubiquitous how long ago? It was screwed up enough that the industry marched on and made IPV4 work and now I don’t see IPV6 ever being fully what it was supposed to be. Neither do I expect to see fiber in every location ever in my lifetime.
Your frustration is understandable. Instead of a clear policy and plan to timely modernize POTS copper to FTTP 30+ years ago, policymakers allowed telcos to continue using the copper for substandard DSL that can’t reach all locations in a service area, particularly as the copper plant reached end of life. That further prolonged the transition to FTTP. It’s still not going well. The whole thing is a fucking embarrassment for what was once a world leader in telecom.
We have ~50 routed towers and around 75 switched micro pops. 3 sites are fed with fiber upstream and working on a 4th one. But we only service ~800 clients. If your familiar with Wisp/ISP numbers that is a high amount of infrastructure for that many clients. That is what it takes to provide solid service on unlicensed spectrum. We don’t do long client shots, and we are not tower centric. I.E. spending many thousands on a tower and then needing to connect as many people as possible to get a decent ROI. This was all done in 5 Ghz distribution, but it set us up well for a transition to 60 Ghz for point to multi-point which we are doing now.
You entirely missed the point. I would love the government to fund the Interstate. What I don’t want is for them build an interstate through my front yard where I am only shipping one load of goods (to use your example) to the market each day.
It looks like the reply system here on this blog is broken
We have been offering a dirt road for decades and no government bureaucrat funding an interstate is going to stop me from helping my customers use their horses to take their goods to market!!
While some Wisps may provide bad data, our company does exhaustive PE certified analysis for wireless ISPs to determine reliable serviceability to the fabric locations. We service around 300 Wisps per filing and I will defend our data to anyone who challenges it. Your assertion that people are simply plotting “circles” is disingenuous and If you have proof of this you should be reporting it to the FCC as there are fines they can hand out for people violating the rules for the submissions. Put up or shut up.