Carrier Groups Agree on Parts of Mobile Challenge Rules

the major wireless carriers to be untruthful about their coverage and requiring consumers to bear the cost of challenging overstated coverage maps,” RWA said: More granularly, the FCC could strengthen its proposal by ensuring “challengers in rural areas can submit low hex resolution challenges“ and requiring the commission to verify maps. Replies were due Monday in docket 19-195. The Competitive Carriers Association also wants an FCC-led verification process. That "will ensure that the burden of submitting accurate information rests in the first instance with the wireless operators that claim to serve the areas that appear in the maps they submit,” CCA said. CTIA agreed FCC verification is critical, especially for initial collection. CTIA stressed the importance of “robust” speed test app: “adopting an approach that helps enable apples-to-apples comparisons of challenge data to a provider’s map is important for ensuring that the challenge process can help improve the accuracy of coverage maps.” AT&T sought tweaks, saying that “the challenge process should be based on a more granular hexagonal resolution to better match provider maps.” Guard against inaccurate challenges and resulting confusion, AT&T said: “For challenges to be reliable they should take into account time-of-day concerns such as environmental issues (humidity, fog, etc.) and cell loading factors (morning rush hour vs. mid-morning) and there should be sufficient negative tests in each temporal range to evidence the lack of coverage.” T-Mobile said most commenters support its calls for using hex-10 cells in challenges. They're “a closer match to the 100-meter bins that providers use in their maps, and using these higher-resolution cells will allow for more granular corrections,” the carrier said. New America’s Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge urged a “consumer-friendly” challenge process. The record shows “skepticism that the mobile carriers’ data will be sufficiently reliable, signifying a clear need for the Commission to proactively validate availability information rather than outsourcing the task to the public,” they said. “Require providers to make consumers aware of the challenge process and ensure that everyone possible is empowered to act when suspicious that they are not receiving the service mobile providers claim to offer in a particular area.”