Crowdsourcing and the Broadband Map

Drew Clark of BroadbandCensus.com has a great idea:

One of the things that BroadbandCensus.com has been doing since our launch, in January 2008, is to provide a crowdsourced, public and transparent collection of data about local broadband Speeds, Prices, Availability, Reliability and Competition. We call this the Broadband ‘SPARC.’

The basic idea is to get as much information from as many sources as possible to create sort of a collage, a national broadband map extrapolated from an enormous set of data points, ideally from lots and lots of individuals. There's a lot to be said for such a bottom-up approach, setting aside the initial challenge of getting folks to participate. The main challenge is that the starting point is a blank slate.

The question, really, is when and how such a crowdsourced resource should inform planning and decision making.

Clark has been outspoken in his criticism of Connected Nation's approach to broadband mapping, offering crowdsourcing as an alternative.

Yet, it seems there's less light between Connected Nation's approach and BroadbandCensus.com's. Indeed, Connected Nation has placed public verification of their mapping results at the forefront. Though they've not referred to the effort as crowdsourcing, I suppose they could.

Connected Nation brokers arrangements with multiple providers offering to protect what those providers believe is proprietary data. In other words, Connected Nation works with providers, accepting the data that they are given. The basic map begins, then, as the map that providers would have us see.

There are multiple reasons to be skeptical of this base map as an outcome. But it is only the first step.

Some providers dramatically overstate their coverage, though it's not always who you might think. Many suspect that Verizon and Comcast claim availability where it is not to make it appear that the broadband challenge is smaller than it may appear. But, according to my conversations with Connected Nation's mapping team, many small providers claim universal access in their service areas. Anyone who claims to be lacking service can get it simply by asking. Whether the data come from large or small providers, there's no way to challenge the assertions providers make other than through address by address verification.

So without attributing motives, we can stipulate one simple fact: for numerous reasons (reticence of providers to cough up accurate data as well as evolutionary nature of their networks) no national broadband map can be accurate.

And given these manifold flaws, the best verifier of any map is the public itself. Hence the importance of some sort of crowdsourcing effort as a corrective to any national map (whether prepared by Connected Nation, some other private sector entity, the providers themselves, or the FCC). In fact, Connected Nation realizes the importance of verification and has, as it happens, probably gotten more inputs from its own rather quiet crowdsourcing efforts than BroadbandCensus.com.