In 2019, the Federal Communications Commission put out its latest Broadband Deployment Report. And as you'd expect from the government, the document is dense—not an easy read at 331 pages. But right in the introduction, it says this:

"The digital divide has narrowed substantially, and more Americans than ever before have access to high-speed broadband. In the time since the Commission’s last Broadband Deployment Report, the number of Americans lacking a connection of at least 25 Mbps/3 Mbps (the Commission’s current benchmark) has dropped from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million Americans at the end of 2017, a decrease of more than 18%." 

That is, apparently, nonsense. The estimation of 6.5 percent of the population of the US who are unable to get broadband may actually be double that.

The FCC's estimate comes from numbers self-reported by internet service providers, using the Form 477 mandated by the FCC. But BroadbandNow's new report about the FCC's findings calls it all into question.

Why? Because Form 477 lets an ISP consider an entire census block covered by the ISP even if only one household has service. A census block is defined as "smallest geographic area for which the Bureau of the Census collects and tabulates decennial census data." That could be an actual block, or a section of an area's population.

So BroadbandNow dove into the 477s and did some other research, and it came up with completely different stats. You can see it tabulated in descending order above, and here's the same states in state alphabetical order.

Their guess: More like 42.82 million people can't get wired broadband (or even fixed wireless) in this country.

BroadbandNow did this by looking directly at 11,663 addresses that fell under the auspices of large ISPs with "check availability" tools on their websites. According to the ISPs, all the addresses should have service (according to the Form 477 data). But 19.6 percent of those addresses came back with reports that the ISP's service is not available. Even if the address had more than one major ISP option, BroadbandNow found 13 percent of them still couldn't get high-speed internet.

This doesn't include coverage of hyper-local ISPs—those little providers that are perhaps municipally run or just service a small area. So it's possible the addresses could be covered by them—they don't have the same "check availability" tools accessible by anyone (like BroadbandNow).

All that said, BroadbandNow is confident in adding another 6.5 percent of the population to what the FCC originally said.

Go read the full report at BroadbandNow; it even includes a dynamic chart of the states that indicates the population of each state and compares the unserved customers from the FCC versus its estimates.

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