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FCC Report Shows Shrinking American Broadband Gap

Published by Townhall on June 4, 2019

By Johnny Kampis

The Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) annual broadband deployment report shows that the number of Americans who cannot access broadband continues to drop.

At the end of 2017, 21.3 million Americans didn’t have access to the FCC’s broadband benchmark of 25 megabits per second download speeds and 3 Mbps upload speeds. That was a decrease of 18 percent from the 26.1 million U.S. residents with no broadband access at the end of 2016.

Chairman Ajit Pai concluded that broadband is being deployed to Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, a requirement by Congress as the FCC compiles its annual report.

The original draft of the report released in February said that only 19.4 million Americans lacked broadband as 2018 dawned, but the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau released a revised draft in early May that said a significant error by one carrier resulted in a mistake in the numbers.

“We’re pleased that the FCC’s policy of making deployment data open and transparent to the public resulted in this error being discovered," he said then, MultiChannel News reported. "Fortunately, the new data doesn’t change the report’s fundamental conclusion: We are closing the digital divide."

Read the original article here