Experts: Better broadband stats needed

The U.S. government needs better ways to measure broadband availability and adoption in order to develop policies that focus on ways to use broadband to improve the economy, several telecom experts said Thursday.

“As policy makers, we need to have an eye to the future,” said Beth Shiroishi, senior director of regulatory policy and planning for AT&T. “Where do we want our country to go, and where do we want our citizens to go?”

Participants of the forum on broadband data, sponsored by conservative think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation, argued that broadband is key to the future of the U.S., but most said current statistics don’t tell the whole picture. Broadband “does mean economic opportunity to those who wouldn’t otherwise have it,” said Clair Kaye, treasurer for Cumberland Internet, which provides broadband to parts of three counties in Illinois.

Many participants complained about biannual broadband adoption numbers put out by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC, in its January broadband report, said that 99 percent of U.S. postal ZIP codes have at least one broadband provider.

But the broadband-less zip codes change between FCC reports, said Kenneth Flamm, chairman of the international affairs department at the University of Texas in Austin. There are other errors in the FCC report: For example, it says his neighborhood has 13 broadband providers when in reality it has one, he said.

The FCC also classifies 200Kbps as broadband when most users would think of it as something, at least 12 times faster, that can deliver full-motion video to computer screens, said Mark Lloyd, senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. The congressional requirements that the FCC measure broadband adoption has been “horribly abused” by the agency, he said.

“How do you manage what you cannot measure?” Lloyd added. “How do we know if there are gaps to fill?”

An FCC spokesman declined to comment on Thursday’s forum, but he noted that in April, the agency began two inquiries into U.S. broadband deployment, including one that will look at ways to better collect information.

Others at Thursday’s forum questioned numbers from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which says the U.S. ranks 15th in per capita broadband adoption among the 30 nations that are OECD members. The OECD numbers don’t measure broadband at work, and they make no allowances for the relatively low U.S. population density, said Dennis Weller, chief economist for Verizon.

Others defended the OECD numbers, saying they at least show that the U.S. has fallen behind other countries as it has dropped from fourth in the rankings. About three-quarters of Japan’s residents can get 100Mbps, fiber-based service, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused think tank. But in densely populated Manhattan, no one can get that speed of service to the home, he said.

Atkinson proposed that U.S. agencies develop a “wikimap” that would allow U.S. residents to report their broadband speeds. Such a tool wouldn’t cost much to create, he said.

New methods of measuring broadband are needed, but not because the U.S. should refute the OECD statistics, said Joseph Waz, vice president for external affairs and public policy at Comcast.

“We need to decide what problem it is we’re trying to solve,” he said. “The number-one goal of this data should be to find out where broadband isn’t.”