Microsoft’s annual update on its Airband Initiative showcased the company’s progress in its quest to close the digitaldivide, but it also highlighted the broadband availability data holes that the FCC has due to its dysfunctional maps. Thecompany said the Airband Initiative, which launched in 2017, is on track to reach its goal of providing access to broadbandto 3mln people in unserved rural areas of the US by July 4, 2022. Shelley McKinley, Microsoft’s head of technology andcorporate responsibility, said that while the company feels good about the progress it has made, it never expected theproblem of rural broadband access to be even bigger than its initial estimates. The FCC’s 2019 broadband report statedthat more than 21mln people in America, 17mln of whom live in rural communities, still did not have access to broadband.A February report by research firm BroadbandNow estimated that number to be more than 42mln. Microsoft’s data isshowing that some 157.3mln people in the US do not use the internet at broadband speeds. The FCC’s much lower estimatecan be attributed to the Commission’s broadband maps, which have long been criticized for being inaccurate. Underits current procedures, if a single subscriber in a census block is identified as having broadband, the Commission concludesthat broadband is available throughout the block. The maps have come under fire recently thanks to FCC chmnAjit Pai’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which directs up to $20.4bln over ten years to finance the building of up to gigabitspeed broadband networks in unserved rural areas. The first phase of the RDOF, which will begin later this year, willmake available up to $16bln in census blocks where existing data shows there is no service whatsoever. Census blockswith even one person receiving service will not receive funding. “Because the government makes many funding decisionsbased on federal data, communities that lack broadband—but, according to FCC data, have access to broadband—haveless access to resources needed to actually secure broadband connectivity,” McKinley said in the post. The House announcedsome progress on the broadband front Tuesday with the passage of two bipartisan broadband mapping billsby unanimous consent. The Broadband DATA Act requires that the FCC issue new rules requiring ISPs to gather anddisseminate granular broadband availability data while the MAPS Act specifies that it is unlawful for someone to willfully,knowingly or recklessly submit inaccurate broadband service data. FCC commish Jessica Rosenworcel, a longtime criticof the Commission’s broadband mapping policies, praised the House for telling the FCC to fix its broken broadband maps and said getting the maps right needs to be a priority. “It’s what the FCC needs to do before sending billions out the doorto help close the digital divide,” Rosenworcel tweeted.
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