"Nobody knows how many people in the country don’t have broadband available to them. We ought to know that.”

Bill would upgrade federal data on Internet access

The federal government’s latest annual report on the availability of high-speed Internet service throughout the United States contains 19 pages of detailed data – pie charts, bar graphs, maps and column upon column of numbers and percentages.

Most of them are useless.

The Federal Communications Commission considers any Internet connection faster than 200 kilobits per second to be high-speed, even though that’s too slow to watch streaming video and download large files effectively. And if broadband service is available to one home in a ZIP Code, the FCC assumes it to be available to everyone in that area because it lacks any more detailed data.

”Nobody knows how many people in the country don’t have broadband available to them. That just doesn’t exist,” said Jeff Campbell, director of technology and trade policy for network equipment leader Cisco Systems Inc. ”We ought to know that.”

By Jim Puzzanghera
Los Angeles Times

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