The Last Cautionary Broadband Mapping Tale Before $350 Million Is Wastedip

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: July 7, 2009 2:22:06 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Last Cautionary Broadband Mapping Tale  
Before $350 Million Is Wasted

The Last Cautionary Broadband Mapping Tale Before $350 Million Is Wasted
By Art Brodsky on July 6, 2009 - 6:26pm
<http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2522>

Later this week, on July 9, AT&T will largely complete its mission to  
make irrelevant one of the leading state broadband agencies in the  
country. The agency is the e-NC authority, an organization created  
eight years ago by the state legislature to track the availability of  
Internet services and to push for more and faster Internet service  
across the state.
The European Commission has recognized the excellence of e-NC’s  
programming. Companies such as Microsoft and IBM have recognized the  
agency’s excellence, and Jane Patterson, the executive director, is a  
world-class expert on broadband. And yet, AT&T, with the cooperation  
of compliant state legislators, will put the state government in the  
position of favoring a powerful private company over a state agency.

Needless to say, this is yet another cautionary tale of the perils of  
broadband mapping, and shows that it’s now more likely than ever that  
the telephone and cable companies will prevail in their fight to  
control the information on which a national broadband plan is based.  
Oh, yes, and up to $350 million of taxpayer money will be totally  
wasted.

Last week, State Rep. Bill Faison (D), who chaired the state House  
Select Committee on High-Speed Internet Access in Rural Areas, sent  
around an invitation to the July 9 press briefing. Faison said that he  
and other members of his committee were “very pleased to tell you that  
our efforts to achieve a statewide map accurately and precisely  
depicting broadband availability have finally borne fruit.”

The fruit is not the product of the state agency, however. Faison used  
his announcement to criticize e-NC: “Until now, we have not had a map  
showing street address availability of broadband. e-NC has generated  
maps based on information disclosed by the providers which are based  
on the average number of customers with broadband access in a wire  
center. Unfortunately, information provided in this fashion does not  
allow you to see where broadband is and where it is not, it does not  
allow you to see the holes in the Swiss cheese, and depending on the  
area the hole may be larger than the cheese.”

Note the circular logic here. Faison and other members of his  
committee are criticizing e-NC for their maps, which were based on  
information supplied, or not, as it were, by the telecom industry. The  
state agency has been hampered by AT&T’s unwillingness to supply  
broadband data and its insistence on a very restrictive non-disclosure  
agreement for information the company did supply.

Instead of pushing the industry to stop stonewalling e-NC, Faison and  
the others trashed e-NC’s work and commended the work of – AT&T, the  
very company that hamstrung e-NC. Here is Faison’s praise for the  
industry: “In the face of legislation recommended by the Committee  
which would have required the providers to disclose precise  
information to the Legislature for our staff to generate a detailed  
map of availability, the providers have come together and collectively  
decided to provide the information through Connected Nation, to not  
only provide the “street address” map but also to make the map both  
accessible and interactive through the internet. Special recognition  
should be given to AT&T, Embarq, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, The Cable  
Association, the Telephone Co-op association, and Alltel for their  
work on this matter.”

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