Another year has gone by, and the FCC has issued its annual, almost-useful report on the state of high-speed Internet access deployment in the U.S. Some of the statisticians I used to work with would love this data because it is so easy to twist to support almost any view, optimistic or pessimistic, about the future of the Internet.

Some of the news coverage of this report called it an FCC report on the "status of broadband access," but the FCC is careful not to use the term "broadband."

Maybe this is because the agency has defined "high-speed" to be 200K bit/sec in at least one direction, which is quite a bit less than most assumptions about what is meant by the term "broadband." The FCC also defines a second term, "advanced services," as at least 200K bit/sec in both directions, which also is slower than what I would call "broadband."

At least one news story was headlined High-speed 'Net growth slowing. It focused on the fact that the growth rate of subscribers to high-speed Internet access was "only" 23% in the second half of 2002, while it had been 27% during the first half (never mind that an additional 1.3 million people subscribed in the second half, compared with 1.1 million in the first half). The rate of the increase in growth slowed somewhat but the growth rate was still quite impressive.

The FCC uses an easy-to-get - and misuse - measure of the availability of high-speed services. The agency checks to see in what ZIP codes someone is getting high-speed Internet services. The current report says that someone is receiving high-speed service in 88% of the ZIP codes in the U.S. and that 99% of the U.S. population lives in these ZIP codes. But using the provision of high-speed service to at least one subscriber in a ZIP code as a measure of the overall availability presents, at best, an optimistic view of the real world. It would be far more representative to have some minimum threshold of actual subscribers per ZIP code.

What that threshold should be cannot be guessed at from this data because there is no information on what percent of households (or small businesses) receive service in each ZIP code.

I expect the FCC actually has this information but feels it can not provide the data because it would give away too much information about individual providers. (If you look at the tables the FCC provides, you will see that it already blocks a lot of data for this reason.)