NTIA Head: At First, New Broadband Maps Are ‘Not Going to Be as Good’ as We Want

The rebuilt broadband maps that the federal government will use to navigate a massive broadband buildout are almost ready, but they will need a 1.1 release before a full rollout.

“We want to do this quickly but we need to do it accurately,” Alan Davidson, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said in a video interview Tuesday conducted by Internet Innovation Alliance(Opens in a new window) co-chair Bruce Mehlman.

Last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act(Opens in a new window) included $62.5 billion in funding for universal broadband coverage, with $42.5 billion of that going to the NTIA-run Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD(Opens in a new window)) program.

Davidson has underscored before that NTIA can’t start this journey without accurate data—and the old broadband maps, based on vague filings from internet service providers, would leave his Commerce Department agency driving into a digital-divide ditch. 

“It was based on census blocks,” he said Tuesday of those much-maligned maps. “So if you had one person served in a census block, the whole block was viewed as being served.”

But he also warned that the rebuilt maps will still start with ISP-provided data, even if it’s far more granular. “We still have the same problem, the sources of the data,” he told Mehlman. “It’s not going to be as good as we’d like it to be.” 

Accordingly, the Federal Communications Commission, charged by a 2020 law(Opens in a new window) with fixing this cartographic conundrum, will invite local, state and tribal governments as well as providers to challenge this initial map data(Opens in a new window). 

“They want the chance to challenge the map,” Davidson said, adding that NTIA will hold off on BEAD allocations until that happens: “We’re going to work to make sure that everyone has that one shot.” 

Davidson got an up-close look at the problem of inadequate broadband during a recent tour of Alaska(Opens in a new window). “It’s breathtaking, it’s beautiful, but it becomes instantly clear what the challenges will be,” Davidson said of his stops in rural towns with minimal connectivity. “They’ve got just really slow service.” 

(Credit: Getty Images/victormaschek)

In the Yukon River village of Tanana, Davidson said 200 to 300 people not only have to share a 30Mbps connection but pay $700 or more a month each for it. But a $50.6 million grant(Opens in a new window) Davidson helped announce during the trip will extend fiber to the village, some 150 miles north of Denali. 

Mehlman then asked if NTIA would insist on fiber even if other technologies, such as fixed wireless, might suffice. (IIA, a Washington think tank that includes such members(Opens in a new window) as AT&T, the American Conservative Union, Ciena, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, has advocated that government broadband subsidies not exclude wireless carriers.) 

Davidson said that NTIA’s priority was providing people with the best service possible. “In many many cases, we know that that’s going to be fiber-optic technology,” he said, citing its reliability and scalability. But fiber-first won’t mean fiber-only.

“We fully expect to fund a lot of non-fiber technology,” he said, citing fixed wireless and low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband as additional options. 

Mehlman also quizzed Davidson about other areas of tech policy, in particular privacy. That’s not NTIA’s job to solve, but Davidson all but implored Congress to do the job that has eluded it for decades and finally pass comprehensive privacy legislation. 

“We’re actually hurting ourselves by not having some kind of baseline federal rule,” Davidson said. “It’s a failure of leadership that we don’t have a federal privacy law.”