While most of the media took the recent FCC broadband penetration statistics as gospel (hey, Uncle Sam doesn't tinker with data & science!), a number of critics wonder whether their statistics are accurate, or worse, being manipulated to justify hands-off policies beneficial to industry, but not the unwired... .

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, FCC chief Kevin Martin praised his own policies, claiming that America "leads the world in the total number of broadband connections with 38 million subscribers," and that we were "well on our way to accomplishing the president's goal of universal, affordable access to broadband by 2007."

Maybe, but as telecom critic Bruce Kushnick points out, the FCC reclassified anything over 200kbps as broadband, making such a claim considerably easier.

How many of you would consider a 200kbps asymmetrical connection true broadband?

Penetration data methodology is worse. The FCC considers one wired home in a zip-code to indicate that zip code is broadband enabled. The FCC doesn't release individual penetration data for each zip-code, something Harvard consultant and number cruncher Scott Bradner suggests obfuscates deployment failure.

The exact kind of failure we recently outlined in Shutesbury & Leverett, Massachusetts. They're 300 feet from getting DSL. Verizon doesn't deem them profitable to serve. Verizon also works to pass laws banning towns like this from serving themselves.

"All of the statistics in the FCC report are "up and to the right" and thus look good," states Bradner in a recent Network World article. "It's too bad that it actually does not tell us all that much about Internet service...Maybe someday we will find out, but maybe not from the FCC."

Even FCC Commissioners have found fault with the FCC's penetration methodology. "Finding one high-speed subscriber in a zip code and counting it as service available throughout is not a credible way to proceed," stated Commissioner Copps in 2003 (he also takes issue with the 200kbps classification).

Yet proceed they did, and not much has changed in two years, while a culture of deregulation has thrived. Bradner's 2005 article mirrors the same concerns from a 2003 piece. Corporate think tanks, critical of municipal broadband for bottom line reasons, use incorrect FCC statistics to "prove" things are going so well, there's no need for community broadband.

These reports were required as part of the 1996 Telecom act. If they show penetration issues (to say oh, rural America) the FCC is expected to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability." With a looming Telecom Act rewrite, it should prove interesting to see if the reports aren't eliminated altogether.