{"id":25588,"date":"2009-10-13T00:56:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T04:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091012\/1520216493.shtml"},"modified":"2009-10-13T00:56:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T04:56:00","slug":"friends-dont-let-friends-use-fcc-broadband-competition-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/25588","title":{"rendered":"Friends Don’t Let Friends Use FCC Broadband Competition Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years, we’ve been among those (helped along by the usually excellent GAO) pointing out that the FCC’s “broadband competition” stats were totally bogus<\/a>. They relied on a rather bizarre way of counting competition. First, if a single household in an entire zipcode got broadband (er, actually not really broadband, but we’ll get to that), then everyone in that zip code was counted. On top of that, the definition of broadband was ridiculously low. This has been known for years, and the FCC kept putting out the same bogus stats every years — sometimes even admitting that it knew the stats were bogus, but it didn’t have anything better. More recently, to its credit, the FCC is trying to get better about both how it defines broadband and how it counts things — but that’s just opened up opportunities for the telcos to simply tell the government<\/a> what sort of coverage they offer, without having to reveal any actual data.<\/p>\n

But, still, with the bogus FCC data out there, many folks are trying to claim that there’s robust competition in broadband in the US. Thankfully, Julian Sanchez is pointing out that friends shouldn’t let friends use FCC broadband data<\/a> to discuss competition, and highlights the ridiculousness of the claim that 88% of zip codes have “four or more” broadband providers. It’s even worse than Julian notes. While he points out that in many cases, some of the providers in question are mobile broadband providers offering up pokey EVDO connections, he neglects to mention that most of these connections cost a ton and come with ridiculously low usage caps — such that they’re not really broadband offerings at all. In fact, most 3G broadband data offerings have explicit limits in their contracts saying they cannot<\/b> be used as primary broadband connections. But, it doesn’t stop the same lobbyists who happen to be paid by the same telcos who make these policies from claiming that there’s robust broadband competition.<\/p>\n

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For many years, we’ve been among those (helped along by the usually excellent GAO) pointing out that the FCC’s “broadband competition” stats were totally bogus. They relied on a rather bizarre way of counting competition. First, if a single household in an entire zipcode got broadband (er, actually not really broadband, but we’ll get to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}