Overstatement

There have been a lot of complaints such as this one in the Boston Globe from the Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont lately:

Shumlin offered himself as an example. Data from FairPoint Communications shows the governor's hometown of Putney as wired with high-speed Internet service. Shumlin said that's true in the village, but not out in the hills where he lives.

"That is news to me and my teenage daughters," Shumlin said about data showing his hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuse has DSL, a type of high-speed Internet service. "We need the truth. We can't build out on bad data."

The complaint is well-founded. The federal mapping effort has had the benefit of gettin something down on paper. But in rural areas especially, the strategy taken by NTIA overstates availability. The reason for this is the basic geographic approach taken by the NTIA, an approach that aggregates availability to U.S. Census blocks. Among the problems with this approach is that blocks are not even in size. In urban areas blocks are, well, blocks defined by streets usually. Not so in rural areas where blocks can be quite large.

The bottom line with the basic strategy taken by NITA: aggregating availability data has pitfalls precisely where accuracy is most crucial. Namely, in sparser locations, U.S. Census blocks are large (indeed, those over a certain areal threshold were omitted from the initial map release one presumes for methodological reasons).

In dense areas, generalizing to a more or less arbitrary spatial units makes a certain amount of sense, especially if the units are compact, as blocks tend to be in densely settled areas. But in rural areas, this technique makes less sense because it tends to a) overstate avaialbility and b) deny the granular information needed for strategic decision-making. Aggregating data in this way was a gamibt and maybe a poor one, taken one suspects to avoid drawing a map of discrete actual service areas of individual providers, an approach that would no doubt lead to endless negotiation and litigation.