California Broadband Task Force availability maps leave much to be desired

Drew Clark of BroadbandCensus.com blogged about last week's Broadband Policy Summit IV sponsored by Pike & Fischer. He quoted Jeff Campbell, senior director of technology and communications policy at Cisco Systems, as praising the report issued in January of this year by the California Broadband Task Force for producing "address-level" data about both broadband availablity and throughput speeds.

While the underlying data may be based on a given address, it did not produce maps of similar granularity. The wireline broadband availabilty maps produced by the task force cover such large geographical areas as to be practically useless. There are no reference points such as identification of major highways and towns, nor can a viewer zoom in to view what's available in his or her own neighborhood.

Instead of making useless maps our public policy should incentivize rapid broadband deployment given that much of the nation is years behind where it should be when it comes to broadband services.