Is the FCC Disguising the Rural Broadband Problem?
Buried within the FCC’s February Broadband Deployment Report are some tables that imply that over 95% of American homes can now get broadband at speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps. That is drastically higher than the report just a year earlier. The big change in the report is that the FCC is now counting fixed wireless and satellite broadband when compiling the numbers. This leads me to ask if the FCC is purposefully disguising the miserable condition of rural broadband?
I want to start with some examples from this FCC map that derives from the data supporting the FCC’s annual report. I started with some counties in Minnesota that I’m familiar with. The FCC database and map claims that Chippewa, Lyon, Mille Lacs and Pope Counties in Minnesota all have 100% coverage of 25/3 broadband. They also claim that Yellow Medicine County has 99.59% coverage of 25/3 Mbps broadband and the folks there must be wondering who is in that tiny percentage without broadband.
The facts on the ground tell a different story. In real life, the areas of these counties served by the incumbent telcos CenturyLink and Frontier have little or no broadband outside of towns. Within a short distance from each town and throughout the rural areas of the county there is no good broadband to speak of – certainly not anything that approaches 25/3 Mbps. I’d love to hear from others who look at this map to see if it tells the truth about where you live.
Let me start with the FCC’s decision to include satellite broadband in the numbers. When you go to the rural areas in these counties practically nobody buys satellite broadband. Many tried it years ago and using it is a miserable experience. There are a few satellite plans that offer speeds as fast as 25/3 Mbps. But satellite broadband today has terrible latency, as high as 900 milliseconds. Anything over 100 milliseconds makes it hard or impossible to do any real-time computing. That means on satellite broadband that you can’t stream video. You can’t have a Skype call. You can’t connect to a corporate WAN and work from home or connect to online classes. You will have problems staying on many web shopping sites. You can’t even make a VoIP call.
Satellite broadband also has stingy data caps that make it impossible to use as a home broadband connection. Most of the plans come with a monthly data caps of 10 GB to 20 GB, and unlike cellular plans where you can buy additional data, the satellite plans cut you off for the rest of the month when you hit your data cap. And even with all of these problems, it’s also expensive and is priced higher than landline broadband. Rural customers have voted with their pocketbooks that satellite broadband is not broadband that many people are willing to tolerate.
Fixed wireless is a more mixed bag. There are high-quality fixed wireless providers who are delivering speeds as fast as 100 Mbps. But as I’ve written about, most rural fixed broadband delivers speeds far below this and the more typical fixed wireless connection is somewhere between 2 Mbps and 6 Mbps.
There are a number of factors needed to make a quality fixed broadband connection. First, the technology must be only a few years old because older radios older were not capable of reaching the 25/3 speeds. Customers also need a clear line-of-sight back to the transmitter and must be within some reasonable distance from a tower. This means that there are usually s significant number of homes in wireless service areas that can’t get any coverage due to trees or being behind a hill. Finally, and probably most importantly, the wireless provider needs properly designed network and a solid backhaul data pipe. Many WISPs pack too many customers on a tower and dilute the broadband. Many wireless towers are fed by multi-hop wireless backhaul, meaning the tower doesn’t have enough raw bandwidth to deliver a vigorous customer product.
In the FCC’s defense, most of the data about fixed wireless that feeds the database and map is self-reported by the WISPs. I am personally a big fan of fixed wireless when it’s done right and I was a WISP customer for nine years. But there are a lot of WISPs who exaggerate in their marketing literature and tell customers they sell broadband up to 25/3 Mbps when their actual product might only be a tiny fraction of those speeds. I have no doubt that these WISPs also report those marketing speeds to the FCC, which leads to the errors in the maps.
The FCC should know better. In those counties listed above I would venture to say that there are practically no households who can get a 25/3 fixed wireless connection, but there are undoubtedly a few. I know people in these counties gave up on satellite broadband many years ago. My conclusion from the new FCC data is that this FCC has elected to disguise the facts by claiming that households have broadband when they don’t. This is how the FCC is letting themselves off the hook for trying to fix the rural broadband shortages that exist in most of rural America. We can’t fix a problem that we won’t even officially acknowledge, and this FCC, for some reason, is masking the truth.
I noticed this in the 2016 FCC report as well. Do you think the new offerings from Hughes and Viasat with their 2nd generation satellites make this a less egregious policy by the FCC? Viasat is claiming they will offer unlimited plans in certain cases. Similar to the wireless unlimited plans, there is 40GB-100GB of usage before the traffic is potentially de-prioritized. And they offer speeds up to 50 mbps. Seems pretty decent and could potentially rehabilitate Satellite Internet’s image in underserved areas. On the other hand, the upload speeds and latency are an unsolvable problem with satellite, and you point out the increasing importance of upload in a separate post.
No. These are still high-orbit satellites and regardless of speed will have dreadful latency. This makes them difficult to impossible to use for any real time applications including VoIP, live video streaming, connecting to corporate WANs and even shopping. Speeds will be better than last generation satellites, but they can’t overcome the latency which is what makes them such a dreadful alternative. Go spend half an hour on a satellite connection and you’ll never ask that question again.
Makes sense. I have spent some time on the DSL Reports forums and it does seem like a low quality option. Thanks for the response.