Welcome to BroadbandCensus.com

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, September 11, 2009 – The Federal Communications Commission continues to expand its social networking efforts. On Friday, the agency launched a crowd-sourcing platform, Ideascale, at http://broadband.gov/ideascale. The Web 2.0 tool allows users to comment on particular points in a national broadband plan, voting items up or down on a rolling scale, or to add new ideas into the mix. As of 12:51 p.m., the top three ideas on the site were “Broadband plan must address needs of people with disabilities;” “Some specific points about accessibility,” including obtaining detailed disability information in surveys and market research activities, and “Data coordination” between the FCC and other government agencies. In a statement, the FCC said that “crowd-sourcing allows the online community to discuss, evaluate and rank ideas. The platform will be especially useful as the Commission develops a National Broadband Plan, which will provide a strategy for reaching all Americans with robust broadband.” Also on Friday, the FCC launched on social media sites Facebook and YouTube. It had previously launched on Twitter. An easy connection point for all of these social network feeds is http://fcc.gov/connect. Also, the FCC on Friday launched http://www.fcc.gov/rss as a central repository of...

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By Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, July 19, 2009 - Over at O'Reilly's Radar, Carl Malamud discusses the need for a crowdsourced national communiations census, or a broadband census. He writes:

My last tour of duty in DC was Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. One of the fun things I got to do was figure out what everybody else did, including my fellow Senior Fellows, the folks that generated most of the policy work, many of whom are now occupying senior posts in the new administration.

One of the most fascinating was Mark Lloyd. An experienced Emmy-winning television producer, communications lawyer, and community activist, Mark is the author of a well-regarded book aboutcommunications and democracy and numerous columns. He's currently at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights.

The project Mark Lloyd was working on was a National Broadband Map to show our true communications capabilities. And, he wanted to crowd-source the map from community groups, supplementing that with census and other data from several different places to create a big mash-up. This was in 2005, around the same time Adrian Holovaty was thinking about chicagocrime.org.

Here's my reply on the O'Reilly...

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Blog Entries

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 1 - BroadbandCensus.com applied on Saturday for a News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The application, which can be viewed online at the newschallenge.org web site, lays out a plan of action for the future work of this web site. Here's the text of the application:

Project Title:

BroadbandCensus.com is Crowdsourcing Internet Access Community-by-Community: It's the Building Block

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:

$900,000

Expected amount of time to complete project:

1 [year]

Total cost of project including all sources of funding:

$1,100,000

Describe your project:

You are probably reading this on a computing device. You probably have either a wired or a wireless internet connection. You probably have broadband access. What else do you know about your broadband connection? How well does your connection work? Is your carrier limiting your bandwidth? Do your neighbors have the broadband speeds and services that they need to connect to you? BroadbandCensus.com wants you to know everything about your broadband options. We want communities to know. The internet is international, but all broadband is local. BroadbandCensus.com understands this. We are building the knowledge base about broadband – through data, news and now through video. Just as the market for...

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Broadband Census Arizona

By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com; and William G. Korver, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

This is the 16th of a series of articles surveying the state of broadband, and broadband data, within each of the United States and its territories. October 15 – “Reliable, affordable access to high-capacity telecommunications infrastructure has become as essential as water, sewer, transportation and electricity service in creating healthy and successful communities in the 21st century.” So begins a 2007 report by the Arizona Department of Commerce, the “Arizona Broadband Initiative Framework.” The report concludes: “the opportunity for states to use ubiquitous broadband deployment as a competitive differentiator is quickly passing.” Further, “the realization of broadband connectivity in parts of rural Arizona will not be accomplished by relying on normal market forces alone.” In sum, the report urges government officials and others to expand and enhance broadband networks in the southwestern state. Arizona is now setting off on a path that a handful of other U.S. states are already on. Officials in the Grand Canyon State sought to learn what other states have done to expand broadband services beyond those provided by market forces. The Arizona Telecommunications and Information Council (ATIC) is tasked with coordinating state, as well as public/private projects,...

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News

Editor's Note: The following story was published in TR Daily on September 26, 2008, and is reprinted with the permission of Telecommunications Reports International, Inc. Notwithstanding the fact that content on the BroadbandCensus.com web site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, this article is and remains Copyright 2008 Telecommunications Reports International, Inc.

By Lynn Stanton, TR Daily

State and federal government programs to develop maps of broadband service availability at a granular level must overcome objections by carriers to revealing what they view as proprietary information, although carriers may actually find the resulting maps beneficial, panelists at the Broadband Census for America Conference said today.

Speaking at the conference held at the Washington office of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Art Brodsky, director-communications at Public Knowledge, criticized the carriers’ objections to broadband mapping projects by questioning the proprietary and competitive value of information on where carriers have already deployed broadband services. He noted that carriers are not being asked about future deployment plans, which would more clearly involve competitive concerns.

Drew Clark, executive director of BroadbandCensus.com, which was one of...

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Blog Entries

By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com

August 21 - Looking back at three productive and engaging days at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit, it's worthwhile to step back and examine the so-called digital revolution with an eye towards the future of innovation. What were the essential questions asked by the summit discussants? What are possible answers? I'd like to contextualize the issues that arose in regards to the mission of BroadbandCensus.com. The stated goal of the Aspen Summit was to discover the contemporary keys to innovation. The market and policy issues addressed as a part of this discovery included online copyright enforcement, targeted web advertising, network traffic management, innovation and global economic competitiveness -- and broadband connectivity in the US and around the world. While many of these issues have been around for a while, internet users, innovators and policy makers are confronting them today in substantively new ways. The best way to sum up what's new: internet communications have reached a new stage of maturity as a many to many medium. John Horrigan opened the Summit by reporting that 40% of internet users are also contributors to the medium. While the digital revolution may be...

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Blog Entries

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, August 19 - BroadbandCensus.com is pleased to support One Web Day, and I am very happy to be an Ambassador for this effort. Most Americans who have high-speed internet can't imagine life without broadband. How could you connect to the Internet of today without it? In today’s world, broadband is as basic as running water and electricity. And yet the U.S. is falling behind globally. As a technology reporter, I’ve been writing about the battles over broadband and the Internet for more than a decade here in Washington. Yet there is one fact about which nearly everyone seems to be in agreement: if America wants better broadband, America needs better broadband data. That’s why I’ve recently started a new venture to collect this broadband data, and to make this data freely available for all on the Web at http://BroadbandCensus.com. One Web Day presents an opportunity for all of us to take stock with the true state of broadband in this country. BroadbandCensus.com wants to work with each of you to help us “crowdsource” the data we need to get a better handle on availability, competition, speeds, prices, and quality of service of local broadband.

What is...

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Regulatory Filing

Editor's Note: The following is the regulatory filing made by BroadbandCensus.com in the Federal Communications Commission's inquiry about how to best map out information about local broadband. Footnotes are available in the PDF version of file. (The link is at bottom.)

By Drew Clark, Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com

COMMENTS OF BROADBANDCENSUS.COM IN RESPONSE TO THE FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING

I. INTRODUCTION

BroadbandCensus.com respectfully submits these comments in response to the Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“Further Notice”)1, released June 12, 2008, in the above-captioned proceeding of the Federal Communications Commission (“Commission”). We respond to the invitation for comment on Section IV(B) of the Further Notice.2 BroadbandCensus.com is a new, free web service that allows the public to share and learn information about where individual broadband companies provide service. In taking the Broadband Census, consumers enter their ZIP+4 codes, identify their carriers, rate their services and conduct a free broadband speed test. Doing so enables them to compare their actual internet speeds against what their carriers promise.3 They are also invited to make comments, which are posted on the web site of BroadbandCensus.com, about the service quality of their broadband provider. BroadbandCensus.com is a consumer-focused service with an aim to better inform the public and policy-makers...

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