FCC Sued For Broadband Data

By law the FCC is required to issue an annual report on the state of the broadband union. The commission has received ample criticism for the accuracy of these reports and their data collection methods, with critics charging the agency is skewing data 'up and to the right' in order to justify hands-off deregulatory policies. Policies lobbied for by the nation's largest incumbent providers that may result in coverage gaps. Most criticized (see General Accounting Office report) has been the FCC's low broadband watermark of 200kbps, and their methodology for determining broadband penetration in the United States. For years the FCC's annual reports have stated that if a zip code has just one broadband customer, that zip-code is considered "wired." The end result: the FCC claims that 99% of the country is wired. In an effort to get more accurate data, the Center for Public Democracy has sued the FCC to obtain a database that shows which companies serve which zip-codes, and how extensively.