FCC delays report on broadband access

For the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission each January and June has released data on the number of high speed telco and cable connections to the Internet. The most recent report was issued Jan. 31, 2007. As your blogger reported in early February, it revealed that local telephone companies failed to provide DSL in more than 20 percent of their service areas as of June 30, 2006.

The FCC report covering the last half of 2006 was due out in June. But it's been inexplicably delayed. An FCC spokesman assured me in a July 20, 2007 email that it would be released "soon" but it's still MIA nearly two months later. A likely explanation is the FCC is delaying the report's release at the behest of the telcos since it's likely to show that telcos have made little if any progress shrinking their massive broadband black holes during the last six months of 2006.