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West Virginia Officials Look for Common Ground with State, FCC Internet Data

Members of the state’s broadband council are discussing the possibility of combining its speed test data with the Federal Communications Commission’s access data, which has been criticized for being inaccurate.

(TNS) — The state broadband council discussed Thursday melding its own data with federal data to paint a more accurate picture of West Virginia broadband internet access, one month after its chairman blasted numbers in a federal report on broadband for “not even being close to correct.”

Rob Hinton, chair of the West Virginia Broadband Enhancement Council, floated the idea of combining data from the council’s internet speed test with data in the Federal Communication Commission’s 2018 Broadband Deployment Report at the council’s monthly meeting.

“I know there are inaccuracies with the [FCC report’s] data, and there are also myriad inaccuracies with the speed test data,” Hinton said. “Somewhere in the middle, we may end up finding some common ground comparing the two, a more reliable assessment of where broadband service is and where it isn’t.”

The FCC report says seven West Virginia counties have 100-percent access to a fixed (non-mobile) broadband connection. The counties listed are: Barbour, Gilmer, Harrison, Lewis, Marion, Randolph and Upshur. The state as a whole had 82.2 percent broadband access, per the report.

Hinton said previously that the report could jeopardize federal funding for broadband expansion in these areas.

“One of the disadvantages that a community or a county identified as 100-percent covered has is that any program we put together, or any program that comes from the federal level, is that it’s going to be difficult to call for them to get awarded,” he said.

The FCC used Form 477 data filed by broadband providers from December of 2016, which measures access by census blocks, in its report. So if one location has broadband access in the block, the entire block is considered “covered” by the data. An FCC spokesman said previously that this could “somewhat overstate deployment.”

Meanwhile, the broadband council has been collecting data from its West Virginia Speed Test, which allows residents and business owners to measure their internet connection speed.

The council wants data from the speed test, which launched in October of 2017, to inform the state and the FCC on unserved and underserved areas for broadband access in West Virginia.

But the speed test hasn’t yet collected a sufficient sample size in certain areas of the state, said Tony Simental of the state Office of GIS Coordination. That means it would be hard to make a sufficient case for broadband expansion efforts in these areas using only the speed test data, he said.

One area Simental used as an example was Mingo County, where only eight speed test results have come from.

“If we were going to be making a case for Mingo County [for funding], I don’t think we could actually demonstrate anything with those tests,” he said.

Simental said he hopes the 12 broadband projects receiving funds from the state’s Community Development Block Grant program will help in efforts to gather more data, potentially by raising awareness of the council’s speed test in the 27 counties the projects are involved in.

Simental added that the council should be looking for ways to reach people that lack internet access entirely for data collection purposes.

“We want to try and grow this model,” Hinton said of collecting broadband access data. “The better data we have, the better we can report it.”

Also at the meeting, Tony O’Leary, project manager at the state Development Office, noted House Bill 4629’s progress on the Senate floor. The bill would repeal a section of the state code established by last year’s “broadband bill” that eased third-party access to telecommunications poles.

Proponents of last year’s bill said streamlining pole attachment rules would allow companies to more easily expand their internet services.

But Frontier Communications, which owns or uses a majority of poles in the state, opposed that section of the bill. Frontier sued to remove it last year, arguing it conflicts with law established by the FCC. The case is still pending in U.S. District Court in Charleston.

If a state wants to regulate its own pole attachments, it has to certify with the FCC that it will do so first. Otherwise, federal pole attachment laws still apply.

An amendment from the Senate Government Organization Committee to House Bill 4629 gives the state Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities and was named in the lawsuit, authority to regulate pole attachments. The amendment also says the commission will send certification to the FCC that it will do so.

Billy Jack Gregg, a Frontier consultant, told the committee Wednesday that the pole attachments statute needs to be repealed “or the lawsuit is not resolved,” adding that Frontier doesn’t have a stance on the PSC’s potential jurisdiction on pole attachments.

©2018 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.