Tag Archives: FCC Broadband Map

Counting Farm Passings

The NTIA recently issued a directive encouraging States to get ISPs to remove locations from BEAD grant applications that can’t be served by broadband. These extra locations might be barns, sheds, or other locations that are not eligible for a BEAD grant. This doesn’t sound like an unreasonable request until you look a little deeper at the issue of identifying and counting passings in farming areas.

It’s been clear to anybody who has looked closely at the FCC mapping fabric in rural areas that there are a lot of errors. The FCC map fabric is supposed to identify every place that is a likely candidate to buy broadband. You can find almost any imaginable issue with the map fabric.

  • There are plenty of places where CostQuest has placed a grant-eligible location in the middle of a field, far from any home or business. Those are clearly not supposed to be there.
  • But there are plenty of locations where there are rural homes that are not identified as eligible in the fabric.
  • The most interesting category are locations that are misplaced, but not really an error. You might find a farm where the barn is considered as the eligible location but not the house. We’ve found places where the identified location is where the farm lane meets the highway instead of at the farmhouse.

The NTIA is asking ISPs to eliminate locations where the maps are clearly incorrect but not letting ISPs add back locations that should be in the fabric. This feels like a way to reduce the amount of grants being awarded instead of trying to get it right.

I’ve had a few ISP clients look at a rural area in detail. Several of them have told me that for every mapping fabric location that doesn’t exist, there is a missing location that should be in the fabric. They’ve concluded that the overall count of BEAD-eligible locations is generally not bad as long as you don’t worry about the errors in both directions.

Local governments and rural ISPs have known about this for a long time. Many local governments tried to fix the FCC fabric during the BEAD map challenge, but were told they couldn’t do it, and that the map challenge was only to identify if a location was served or unserved. State broadband offices told local governments to take such issues up with the FCC – a time-consuming and hit-and-miss process that wouldn’t fix a map in time for the BEAD grant process. Many folks who have tried to fix the FCC fabric have given up because of the complexity of making the requests.

All of this talk about getting the maps exactly right ignores the reality of broadband for farms. I recently talked to the manager of a rural electric cooperative who told me that one of his farmers wants broadband at five different locations, even though he has only one farm house. This farmer is like many others who have fully embraced the benefits of broadband for monitoring sites and performing tasks remotely through broadband. Farmers want broadband at corn dryers, silos, barns, grain silos, feed lots, you name it. I interviewed a farmer last year who told me that he feels more like an IT technician than a farmer most days. Everything this farmer does involves complex software and broadband.

I think it turns out that CostQuest has probably inadvertently identified a lot of farming locations that really are candidates for broadband. Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to wipe out rural locations on the FCC map.

How Big is the Broadband Industry

I constantly see articles that make claims about the percentage of homes that have broadband, cable TV, or telephone service. I remember an FCC report a few years ago that claimed that 88% of homes at the time had home broadband. Any time I see a statement like that, I ask the question – how many total homes are in the U.S. – a number that is needed to calculate a penetration rate. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on that question.

Let me provide some examples.

  • Cartesian recently released a report in conjunction with the Fiber Broadband association that said as of June 2023 there were 54.1 million fiber passings, which the report says is a 45% national market penetration. That math suggests there are 120 million total U.S. possible passings.
  • RVA released another report in conjunction with the FBA that said as of September 2023 there were 69 million fiber passings, which equates to 128 million total U.S. possible passings.
  • Leichtman Research Group has for years published a list of the claimed broadband customers of the largest ISPs. As of the end of end of 2023 the biggest ISPs collectively claimed 114.7 million broadband customers. Leichtman said these ISPs represent 95% of the broadband market, which implies that there are more than 120 million broadband customers at the end of 2023. That implies a much higher number of total possible passings.
  • The FCC broadband map counts BSLs (broadband serviceable locations), which are places where a customer can buy broadband. The FCC fabric says there were 114.4 million BSLs at the end of 2023. It’s hard to know what to do with this number.

Over the years, I’ve tried to use the U.S. Census to figure this out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total potential U.S. broadband market at the end of 2023 was something like the following:

Residential living units           145.8 million

Business establishments         13.6 million

Total                                         169.4 million

The business count comes from subtracting 19 million home-based businesses from 32.6 million total businesses in the Census.

Consider some other statistics that probably have some impact on figuring out the denominator of potential broadband customers:

  • CoStar, which tracks the housing industry, says there were 18.4 million apartment units at the end of 2023.
  • A recent survey from GOBankingRates said that 40% of families have a second or vacation home. Counting vacation homes is a controversial issue with the FCC maps. Vacation homes can very from multi-million dollar homes at the beach to a hunting cabin with no electricity.
  • A recent study by Lending Tree showed there are 5.5 million vacant homes just in the largest 179 metropolitan areas that are used as short-term rentals and vacation homes.

I’ve tackled this exercise periodically and have never gotten close to having a satisfactory answer. I think many of the folks who cite penetration rates are off base – as you can see from this blog, that’s not surprising. Who knows what ISPs are counting when they claim fiber passings? I have an idea that a lot of ISPs are claiming the same passings, particular for multi-dwelling units. Are folks counting businesses properly? Are they accounting for abandoned and empty homes? What’s the right way to count second homes?

The bottom line for me is to assume any statistic that claims a national penetration rate for a  broadband statistic is not accurate – possibly badly so. This doesn’t imply that the folks making a claim are being deceptive – I think it just means that there is no consensus for the denominator used to calculate a national penetration rate. There are folks in academia and government who might be able to shed light on this – but I would expect that different experts will come up with different methods of counting.

Shouldn’t Broadband Mapping Data Belong to the Public?

I haven’t written a blog about FCC mapping for a while, and it feels almost wrong not to go on record about mapping in the new year. My biggest current pet peeve about the FCC mapping is that the agency made the decision to give power over the mapping and map challenge process to CostQuest, an outside commercial vendor.

The FCC originally awarded CostQuest $44.9 million to create the broadband maps. Everybody I know who works with mapping thinks this is an exorbitant amount, but if this was the end of the mapping story, then congratulations to CostQuest for landing a lucrative federal contract – lots of other companies have made hay doing so over the years.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the mapping story because the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.

A case in point is that soon after CostQuest created the first FCC map, the company was hired by the NTIA to provide the databases and maps for the BEAD grant process for a price tag of $49.9 million – more than the FCC paid to create the maps. CostQuest will also sell access to the mapping fabric to others for a fee. I have to imagine that the FCC is also paying CostQuest a big fee twice a year to update the FCC maps and to process map challenges.

I’m just flabbergasted that there is a private company that holds the reins to the database of broadband availability and which only makes it available for a fee.

I can’t think of even one reason why the database created by CostQuest is not openly available to everybody. The taxpayers funded the collection of this data and paid CostQuest handsomely to organize it. For various reasons, the public can’t easily use the data. The FCC makes a snapshot of the data available to the public in the FCC broadband map and allows everybody to look at their home or any other home or neighborhood in the country. While that is useful information, the average person can’t do much more than that, and it is impossible to use the FCC map to fully understand broadband across a city, a county, or a region. To understand broadband in a city would require looking manually at each household and somehow digesting what it all means.

The fault for this lies squarely with the FCC. I can’t imagine how folks at the FCC could think it is reasonable to pay a vendor to create a database and then relinquish ownership of the database to the company that created it. I wouldn’t be bothered if the FCC created a long-term contract with CostQuest to update the database, although periodic competition for ongoing work would make sure the public gets a good deal.

Our industry is full of data geeks who could work wonders if they had free access to the mapping fabric database. There are citizen broadband committees and retired folks in every community who are willing to sift through the mapping data to understand broadband trends and to identify locations where ISPs have exaggerated coverage claims. But citizens willing to do this research are not going to pay the fees to get access to the data – and shouldn’t have to.

The FCC says that getting broadband to everybody is its most important mission. However, restricting access to mapping data doesn’t support that sentiment. It almost feels more like the FCC doesn’t want folks pointing out the many errors in the data, which is a shame. Nobody expected mapping data that is reported by ISPs to be accurate since ISPs all have their own agendas. When the new maps were created. I had high hopes that an army of volunteers could challenge the ISPs and set the record straight. It seems like the FCC went out of its way to make sure that doesn’t happen by giving a gatekeeper the ownership of the data.