Broadband Availability Is Overstated In Every State

In 2020, we manually checked availability of more than 11,000 addresses using Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Form 477 data as the “source of truth.” Based on the results, we estimated that as many as 42 million Americans did not have the ability to purchase broadband internet at the time. Since then, quite a bit has changed. The FCC has moved away from the outdated and flawed Form 477 reporting mechanism, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program has become the primary model for government intervention on the digital divide, and the FCC has provided a new dataset for states to use for allocating the billions of dollars they will receive through this once-in-a-generation program. Our team has been manually checking availability at nearly 65,000 addresses spread across all US states and comparing those findings to the FCC’s new mapping fabric. What we have found is that overreporting continues to be rampant, and exists in every state, across every technology type.

• The FCC claimed that roughly 21 million Americans still had no access to a broadband internet connection meeting the 25 Mbps download / 3 Mbps upload threshold as of the time we generated the data used in this study. Based on our findings, we estimate that an additional million Americans do not have service, totaling 22 million.
• Texas has the most Americans without broadband in total, with 1.8 million lacking access to a 25/3 connection.
• While all technologies are overstated in terms of coverage, DSL and fixed wireless were the worst offenders in the sample set, at 53% and 58%, respectively.