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

pcmag.com:

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