Mississippi, Vermont Complain About FCC Mobile Wireless Challenge Process
Mississippi and Vermont officials see many problems with the FCC's mobile wireless coverage challenge process where stakeholders can claim the agency's estimates of broadband availability are wrong. Despite the commission's trying to fix things and meeting with stakeholders in his…
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state, the process seems doomed, "an almost utter waste of time," said Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley. "We utterly failed after a ton of work to try to" provide updates, said Presley, who has been critical of the process (see 1811010031). "You can’t get a signal with a SWAT team and a search warrant. It’s just not there," he said of access in some areas. The FCC app didn't fully work, and it took the federal commission about two months to make some fixes, the commissioner said. "The app would not record places that had no service" as he personally observed them, he told NARUC's meeting in Indianapolis Monday. "If you’re in an area with no service, it never recorded the GPS coordinates." No challenges from the thousand-some Mississippi residents who participated "made the cut" at the FCC, he recalled. "If that is not a process designed to fail, then I don’t know what a process designed to fail is." Presley wonders "do we really want to have an honest, effective challenge process or is this just window dressing?" The FCC declined to comment. Vermont's tests faced other problems, said Department of Public Service Telecom Infrastructure Specialist Corey Chase. The FCC needs testers to examine square kilometer blocks, which would be about 25,000 in Vermont, he said: Some 25 percent of those blocks lack roads. “Which really slows your process down if you are driving. It’s also really dangerous" constantly turning on and off roads, the telecom staffer told the panel (see listing at 4 p.m.). "We thought of doing what Mississippi did, developing a brigade, but frankly, there wasn’t enough time" to get citizens to participate, said Chase. Though Vermont challenged slightly more than half of the blocks, because many didn't meet a test threshold, most such places weren't successfully challenged, he said. Those benchmarks can be "silly" and the FCC may not say why one's submission was rejected, he said: "What we’ve seen here is propagation maps are the result of thousands of assumptions" rather than actual data Vermont submits.