At long last the NTIA released its long-awaited national broadband map and broadband adoption survey results. Version 1.0 of this map, which was designed by Computech, is designed to give users a view where broadband is and is not available in the U.S.
While the the publicly-searchable map will give a snapshot of broadband availability in the U.S., it really illustrates what most industry watchers have known all along: There's a dearth of broadband access in rural areas.
Acting Commerce Deputy Secretary Rebecca Blank, said that "a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure is essential to America's competitiveness in the global digital economy," adding that "Congress recognized, we need better data on America's broadband Internet capabilities in order to improve them."
Although the map is a good first step in understanding how to improve broadband availability, Rick Chessen, the NCTA's senior vice president of Law & Regulatory Policy opined in a blog that the map should be called "Version 1.0" because he believes there's a need for more data.
"Acknowledging that this is the first step in an ongoing iterative process is in no way a criticism of NTIA or the state mapping entities--it is simply the inevitable byproduct of a massive, first-of-its-kind data collection effort," Chessen said.
For more:
- see the release
- here's FierceCable's take
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