No WAN's Land: Mapping U.S. Broadband Coverage with Millions of Address Queries to ISPs
No WAN's Land: Mapping U.S. Broadband Coverage with Millions of Address Queries to ISPs
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无 WAN 土地：通过向 ISP 进行数百万个地址查询来绘制美国宽带覆盖范围
DOI：
10.1145/3419394.3423652
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Jonathan R. Mayer
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
David Major;Ross Teixeira;Jonathan R. Mayer
准确的宽带覆盖数据对于公共政策规划和政府支持计划至关重要。在美国，联邦通信委员会负责维护国家宽带覆盖数据。由于粗粒度的数据收集和低覆盖阈值，观察家们对FCC的宽带地图进行了抨击，称其夸大了可用性。我们展示了一种新的方法来建立宽带覆盖地图：自动化的大规模查询，主要的互联网服务提供商提供的公共可用性检查工具。我们对美国九家主要互联网服务提供商的覆盖工具进行了逆向工程，测试九个州超过1900万个住宅街道地址的服务，并将结果与FCC的地图进行比较。我们的研究结果表明，FCC的覆盖数据大大夸大了每个ISP服务的可用性，对任何宽带的访问，消费者可用的连接速度以及宽带市场的竞争。我们还发现，联邦通信委员会的数据不成比例地夸大了农村和少数民族社区的覆盖面。我们的研究结果突出了一个有前途的方向，开发更准确的宽带地图和验证覆盖报告。
Accurate broadband coverage data is essential for public policy planning and government support programs. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission is responsible for maintaining national broadband coverage data. Observers have panned the FCC's broadband maps for overstating availability, due to coarsegrained data collection and a low coverage threshold. We demonstrate a new approach to building broadband coverage maps: automated large-scale queries to the public availability checking tools offered by major internet service providers. We reverse engineer the coverage tools for nine major ISPs in the U.S., test over 19 million residential street addresses across nine states for service, and compare the results to the FCC's maps. Our results demonstrate that the FCC's coverage data significantly overstates the availability of each ISP's service, access to any broadband, connection speeds available to consumers, and competition in broadband markets. We also find that the FCC's data disproportionately overstates coverage in rural and minority communities. Our results highlight a promising direction for developing more accurate broadband maps and validating coverage reports.