We Used Broadband Data We Shouldn’t Have

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-used-broadband-data-we-shouldnt-have-heres-what-went-wrong/

by Amorymeltzer • 9 years ago

284 94 9 years ago

code4tee• 9 years ago

Nice to see they’re being so transparent about setting the record straight. Mistakes like this happen in the journalism business, but few outlets make a serious effort correct misreporting beyond burying corrections where nobody sees them.

colemannugent3• 9 years ago

Yeah, most news outlets will edit the original article with a small correction. Props to them for a full postmortem article.

blensor3• 9 years ago

I am usually not one who favors government regulation of journalistic outlets, however I do have a proposal.

Media outlets should be required to publish a correction of a story at least as visible and for at least as long as the initial incorrect version.

This would prevent a site from first claiming something and then burying the correction somewhere where nobody finds it.

stusmall• 9 years ago

Overall they do such a good job of that. They seem to really value self-improvement and reflection. Its part of what keeps me as a regular reader. One editor even does a yearly public review of the work he did that year, what he did wrong, and how he plans on improving it.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/mea-culpa/

taoistextremist2• 9 years ago

Harry Enten is probably my favorite personality of FiveThirtyEight, mainly because of the amount of humility he has despite the fact that he's very good at his job from what I can tell.

weberc23• 9 years ago

I agree. This error has a pretty happy ending, but I think more political and ideological diversity in academia and journalism would help to spot these errors sooner and improve the overall quality of science and science journalism. In particular, in this case, a progressive research firm was trusted by academics who were trusted by journalists. Mistakes will happen regardless, but I wonder if a more skeptical eye somewhere in the pipeline would have caught this error sooner. Fortunately, there are bipartisan organizations like [Heterodox Academy][0] which are working to correct this.

[0] https://heterodoxacademy.org

throwawayjava4• 9 years ago

The major ISPs have a ridiculous amount of resources and are free to publish datasets answering this question at any moment. In fact, I'd be astounded if they don't already have this data, both for themselves and for their competitors. So until ISPs share that data, I'm terminally unsympathetic to any sort of bias in the public record on this particular topic.

Also, the selection of left-leaning people doing publicly accessible research is, AFAICT, a self-selection. The problem isn't that our institutions are biased, but that conservatives (in general) choose not to pursue scientific careers in the same numbers as liberals. This suggests a fundamental limit to your proposed solution because there aren't enough "heterodox" collaborators to ensure viewpoint diversity. One of the studies published on the website you mentioned even suggests this underlying cause.

Also, I'll note that in the vast majority of academia, internal politics (what research methodologies, maths, etc. someone likes to use) are far more of a problem than external politics (of the sort you'd typically call "politics" in general conversation). E.g. I'm not at all worried about "liberal bias" in physics or chemistry or CS; if it's a problem at all, then it's a minor one compared to other problems.

rayiner2• 9 years ago

Yeah this is wonderful. Some of the original data just didn’t make sense. For example, London County, which is home to the Dulles technology corridor and has the highest median income of any county in the US, with a 3.5% poverty rate, has only 50% home broadband uptake?

mobilefriendly• 9 years ago

I live a few miles outside of Loudoun County, still in DC metro, and I have NO terrestrial internet access beyond dialup. It is quite possible that large sections of Loudoun don't have real broadband, just DSL. The county doesn't even have 100% cell phone coverage. There's Dulles/Leesburg, and everywhere else.

wutbrodo• 9 years ago

Yea, 538 is one of the only outlets I can think of that quietly lives up to the standards that most media entities seem to think they hold themselves to.

They're like Vox, minus the self-back-patting about intellectual honesty and plus the _actual_ intellectual honesty.

jobu2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately they don't discuss two of the biggest disparities I've seen in reporting on broadband internet access:

1) How do they define "Access"? Does it mean actual subscriptions? Does it mean the building/home is connected? Or does it mean a line passes the household, but there's actually no way to connect to it? (Look up New York City's lawsuit against Verizon's FIOS rollout.)

2) How do they define "Broadband"? In 2010 the FCC defined it as 4 Mbit/s down, 1 Mbit/s up. In 2015 they redefined it as 25 Mbit/s down, 3 Mbit/s up. Currently I have 50Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up which Comcast absolutely defines as "Broadband", but it doesn't meet the FCC definition.

danjoc• 9 years ago

In 2015 they redefined it as 25 Mbit/s down, 3 Mbit/s up.

How can that be? That's the same time we achieved net neutrality. That's not net neutral. That's fast lane on download, slow lane on upload. Asymmetric bandwidth is a prime reason why we all can't host our own clouds and social networks.

ahupp2• 9 years ago

I have never seen anyone define net neutrality as including symmetric bandwidth. I am also skeptical that lack up upload bandwidth has much to do with the lack of success for self-hosted social networks.

w0m• 9 years ago

But different technologies support different speeds. Fiber can do symmetric much easier than cable can as an example, and cable is much more ubiquitous.

djsumdog• 9 years ago

Network neutrality has nothing to do with bandwidth.

Network neutrality means if I purchase a pipe with x Mbps of potential bandwidth, my communication on that pipe to any destination should have equal priority.

In other words, an ISP shouldn't be able to add rules that say, "When our pipe is congested and we need to slow or drop packets, Google has the highest priority, followed by Amazon, then x, y, z." You cannot shape or throttle traffic basted on where it comes and goes.

You could still have congestion. Maybe the route to AWS has a shorter round trip than to Digital Ocean because of which backbones the ISP has decided to pay for and connect to. But the point of Network Neutrality is that ISPs cannot priorities one packet type over the other. They must try to deliver each payload from each customer evenly and, if they can't, slow or block those payloads evenly and without prejudice.

The one exception to this is if the customer is on IPv6 and uses the prioritization available in the protocol. But even then, the customer is sending an indication to the ISP saying "this packet is not as important" or "this packet is very important."

2bitencryption• 9 years ago

small anecdote on down/up speeds:

I recently signed with Comcast (it was that or DSL) for their 150Mbit/s down plan, and didn't even check the "up" speed, like a fool.

I just assumed around 50Mbit/s, maybe 25Mbit/s at the worst.

It's 5Mbit/s... so I'm downloading gigabytes of huge datasets in a minute, making a small change, then uploading... and uploading... and uploading... better get a coffee....

ct0• 9 years ago

FYI: A gigabit comcast connection is commonly only half that advertised speed. Upload speed included with their gigabit plan is 40mbit. 40mbit. And the upload is always 40mbit in my tests.

evv• 9 years ago

Plus, your internet packets get de-prioritized behind phone and TV on the consumer internet plans. During peak usage hours, you won't even reach those high download speeds.

I recently got a 75/15 package with Comcast Business for $150 monthly. The guaranteed bandwidth seems to be worth it.

fjsolwmv4• 9 years ago

I thought that in an average residential setup, TCP traffic costs something like 1kB up for every 10kB down, just to manage the TCP connection and send requests from client etc . Maybe UDP/video streaming use less upload though.

tialaramex2• 9 years ago

Subscriptions is not generally a very useful metric. I would expect "Access" to mean that you would be able to sign up for and receive service, which might involve just a package arriving and you plug it in, but might mean people show up with a digger and spend a day running cable.

As illustration: The UK has some community owned projects which supply Internet access to otherwise under-served rural areas. The government ensures commercial suppliers don't run "spoiler" projects (e.g. when a community project announces they're coming to some village, the incumbent Telco can't suddenly remember they decided to run ultra-fast Internet to that village with a free introductory offer)

B4RN (Broadband For the Rural North but pronounced "Barn") is the most famous. They run dedicated fibre near to all the properties in a rural area, if you own some cottage in a little country village they're serving, the fibre probably runs in the grass outside your fence.

But people (probably volunteers since it's B4RN) need to come dig up your lawn and run cable to your cottage before you can actually use the service. B4RN charges a fair amount of money for this setup, although it's waived if you instead pay even more money to become a shareholder in their corporate entity. But still, the cottage would have "Access" once that fibre is outside, because B4RN have a commitment to do the install if you pay for it.

It's silly to say one cottage in a row doesn't have "Access" to B4RN's 1000Mbps symmetric Internet just because the old lady who lives there doesn't need the Internet. If you bought that cottage you could fork over the price of a Nintendo Switch and get Gigabit within a week or so.

Subscription _could_ be a good metric if we were arguing that Internet service is unacceptably expensive in specific regions and thus prices out the lower middle classes or working classes, but that's clearly not the focus of Vox's investigations.

You're right that it's important to classify "Broadband" and give some idea how fast that actually is. Certainly that's something that needs to be in the footnotes for such an article.

jobu2• 9 years ago

Subscription _could_ be a good metric if we were arguing that Internet service is unacceptably expensive in specific regions and thus prices out the lower middle classes or working classes, but that's clearly not the focus of Vox's investigations.

Affordability is actually the main point of 538's second article: "Lots Of People In Cities Still Can’t Afford Broadband" ( https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie... )

However, that article is centered around the data for Washington D.C. and their retraction specifically talks about the data for D.C being incorrect.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC3• 9 years ago

... but then, there is no place on earth where you couldn't "sign up and recieve service" if you have a few billion to spare.

outsidetheparty2• 9 years ago

How do they define "Broadband"?

There's a footnote in the article which says that the FCC data uses the 2016 redefinition of broadband back down to 10mbps:

The FCC has two data sets on broadband connections. For our analysis, we used the data specifying connections with at least 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream.

cpsempek3• 9 years ago

I'm probably being too harsh but...

Good on them for writing this, it's important to admit when you're wrong. However, I feel like this outlet has a larger responsibility to be actual data analysts as well as journalists (over say a more traditional journalist for a more traditional news outlet). As such, why was the analysis done in the postmortem article not done prior to publishing the original articles? A good analyst is one you can trust, and trust for an analyst is built by drawing conclusions from highly defensible data, and highly defensible data is data which has undergone sever scrutiny of the analyst before conclusions are drawn, not after. Also, they should probably update the now erroneous articles with a disclaimer indicating that much of the research is now invalid.

misterbowfinger• 9 years ago

I think the idea is that we all make mistakes. The best we can do is admit them and learn from them, just like any other postmortem.

Also, they did update the erroneous articles:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-a...

cpsempek3• 9 years ago

Also, they did update the erroneous articles:

Ah so they did, my mistake.

I think the idea is that we all make mistakes.

I am in total agreement, we all do make mistakes, and it's refreshing when people own up to them. I guess my main question still stands though. As a top-tier data journalism outlet, why was a data QA not performed prior to analysis, or, before publishing results? And if there was data QA performed, where did it fail? It just seems that they got bit by a time crunch to publish content amid the FCC repeal and sloppy analysis was the result.

olympus2• 9 years ago

It's true that we have lost trust in their analysis, but there is an important thing to remember here: fivethirtyeight is not a peer reviewed journal. You should treat their articles in roughly the same category as a CNN article on something Trump tweeted, not in the category as an article published in Nature. While they do tend to do better data analysis than the Associated Press, 538 articles are not refereed and should not be treated as such. The assumption of a "highly defensible" data analysis is a little strong for them. This is very apparent on their sports section, which should give you a clue about the actual rigor of their analyses. Don't cite a 538 article in your academic research unless the 538 article is directly citing peer-reviewed research (and even then you should probably just cite the original research).

If you think of them as a news organization that uses data as it's gimmick to sell page views, you will be less surprised at events like this (disappointed, yes- surprised, no). They have the same incentive to sensationalize things as a regular news organization. Their mission is not to increase the knowledge of the human race, their mission is to bring in page views to sell ads and make money.

It may sound like I'm coming down harsh on fivethirtyeight. I genuinely enjoy reading some of their articles, but I make sure to remember what kind of organization they actually are and don't fall for the trap of thinking they are a think tank staffed with postdocs.

TheCowboy2• 9 years ago

This anchors motives too much in economic determinism. It's a useful mental model to remember this is a factor, and it can come to dominate and cause problems, but it is not always the one true factor to rule them all through which we should view all motives.

You basically end up arguing that it is all about money, and real journalism cannot happen under profit-seeking organizations. It also trivializes that journalism's big challenge right now is how to do real journalism when the big tech players have vacuumed up their ad revenue.

I also wouldn't treat 538 as the same as CNN writing about a thing Trump tweeted. They actively talk about and discuss their journalistic goals. They try to be openly self-critical about what and how they cover topics. They are trying to compete by not doing the same thing as other organizations.

cpsempek3• 9 years ago

I think this is fair and is a sound refutation to my stance on how rigorous they should be. Your reply reads like a debearding-of-santa, which is maybe what I needed in this case.

VintageCool• 9 years ago

I expect way more of FiveThirtyEight articles than I expect of CNN articles, and I value FiveThirtyEight articles much more than I value CNN articles.

dboreham2• 9 years ago

I'm really confused by this : surely if you want to make a data set that has Internet speed binned by county surely the way to do that is as follows:

1. Go to a large Internet services provider (Amazon, Google, Akamai, Netflix).

2. Ask them to statistically sample the TCP flow rate observed in client traffic, by source IP address.

3. Get a data set that geolocates IP addresses to ZIP code (Amazon for example has this data).

4. Join the two.

pmyteh• 9 years ago

They want data on Internet use (and specifically broadband Internet use) by county. That isn't a trivial ask.

You can get reasonable rates at a larger scale using survey approaches (like OxIS, the British survey series from the Oxford Internet Institute) but these aren't granular enough to compare small areas. Otherwise you're using some kind of proxy data.

Your approach has two issues. First, people without Internet access are not in the sampling frame at all, which is a critical problem if you're interested in network access. Secondly, the geolocation in step 3 is also not particularly reliable (mine tends to think I'm 100 miles away from where I am) so you'll get the same kinds of problems they found here in that the data look kinda plausible but aren't actually reliable enough to draw defensible conclusions from.

bri3d• 9 years ago

Google do this with YouTube already: https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/m/

throwawayjava4• 9 years ago

This methodology would completely miss the point of the 538 story, which was to report on access.

fjsolwmv4• 9 years ago

It makes a reasonable assumption that everyone with access has similar usage profile, at the level of country averages

TheCowboy2• 9 years ago

I've learned that getting a good data set is often the most challenging part of data analysis. You think "it should be easy to get this data" and usually it's not, unless someone else has already done the work.

One flaw I can already identify with your data set is that it doesn't differentiate between traffic originating from workplaces, or cellphone traffic. A source like Netflix could be a heavily biased set since it relies on self-selected subscribers; there is no skipping research about if their user base provides an adequate sample at the county level. Asking a huge company like Google and getting them to pay attention is another challenge.

The article writes about how the FCC does have more granular data, but "the commission is wary of “one carrier learning about another carrier’s market share or where their customers are,” Rosenberg said." So you are at the mercy of competitive businesses willingly releasing data that competitors might find useful.

oxguy3• 9 years ago

How many people are represented by a single IP address? How do you deal with changing IP addresses (most residential ISPs assign dynamic addresses)? How do you distinguish between residential and commercial traffic? How do you deal with cellular devices (for which GeoIP data is much less accurate)? How do you account for people who don't use the service you got the data from? (Netflix in particular has a limited subscriber base, but all the providers would exclude, say, elderly folks who do nothing but email).

Getting good data at nationwide scale is never as easy as it sounds in your head, unfortunately.

dboreham2• 9 years ago

All good questions:

1. Typically a single IP address represents a single connection. Yes there are providers who NAT multiple subscribers onto one IP but they are rare (because if they do that then they have to maintain NAT logs in order to identify criminal subscribers to law enforcement -- easier to just have 1:1 IP to subscriber).

2. Residential addresses are in fact not really dynamic. Yes they can change from time to time but for the most part they don't (see #1).

3. Cellular traffic can be identified because the cell carriers use specific identifiable netblocks.

4. It doesn't matter if not everyone uses the sampling service because that's the point of sampling.

codezero• 9 years ago

Does anyone here know if there is a way to opt-out of being in the Catalist dataset?

outsidetheparty2• 9 years ago

So if I'm reading this right, there are three data sources here:

1) US Census, which is based on surveying households "do you have broadband, Y/N"

2) FCC data, which is based on ISPs self-reporting (In a footnote the article says they're using Pai's new slower definition of broadband, 10Mbps, not the 2015 definition of 25Mbps.)

3) ASU/Iowa, which depends on a derived variable in commercially-purchased data which "denotes interest in ‘high tech’ products and/or services [including] personal computers and internet service providers" as a proxy for broadband ownership

...and the first two roughly match each other, while the third doesn't. The academics claim the company that sold them the data told them it was a reasonable proxy for broadband, the company says they didn't say that.

CharlesMerriam2• 9 years ago

Responsible adults; I approve.

Notice we applaud the careful report on a research report in exactly the same way we applaud the post-outage report.

zaroth• 9 years ago

I few things I don't like about this;

"After further reporting, we can no longer vouch for the academics’ data set. The preponderance of evidence we’ve collected has led us to conclude that it is fundamentally flawed.... The idea behind the stories was to demonstrate that broadband is not ubiquitous in the U.S. today, even as more of our lives and the economy go online. We stand by this sentiment and the on-the-ground reporting in the two stories even though we have lost confidence in the data set."

If the data you used to reach a conclusion is fundamentally flawed, it's pretty disingenuous to claim you stand by the sentiment. So they started with a conclusion, set out to prove it, later found the data they used to prove it was flawed, but still believe it's true.

The second thing I don't like is it seems readers are very confused between access and usage and their sloppy wording often conflates the two. It appears they were studying usage (actual subscriptions) not access (availability of a high speed connection).

Lastly, they also seem to disregard an LTE wireless connection as usage of broadband, when I would have assumed it would clearly be considered. If LTE wireless is more commonly used as a form of access to broadband internet in certain areas (i.e. rural areas where density can't justify running the fiber, or dense metro where the LTE is so good there's no need for a wire) then not surprising you'll find broadband "usage" is low in those areas, even if those households are absolutely using broadband internet through an LTE hotspot.

ghaff2• 9 years ago

Well, the other data they introduced and which isn't disputed supports the idea that broadband penetration is uneven. Just not at the widespread granular and detailed level that the faulty data purported to show.

You do make a reasonable point about usage and access. Which is more relevant depends on what you're trying to show. Access is whether you can get it at all while usage could well bring in economics as well.

It's a fair point about LTE. They don't seem to have included satellite either, which definitely gets used in rural areas where nothing else is available. I suspect though that neither of these would affect overall conclusions that much.

hardwires• 9 years ago

> If the data you used to reach a conclusion is fundamentally flawed, it's pretty disingenuous to claim you stand by the sentiment. So they started with a conclusion, set out to prove it, later found the data they used to prove it was flawed, but still believe it's true.

It's just a sentiment. I have a strong sentiment that LTE reception in the middle of the Sahara is terrible. I haven't collected any data whatsoever to support that sentiment, yet I fully stand by it. There's nothing disingeneous about that.

fny• 9 years ago

So they started with a conclusion, set out to prove it, later found the data they used to prove it was flawed, but still believe it's true.

Nate Silver and 538 are fairly hardcore Bayesians, and this is how pretty much all Bayesian thinking works.

You start out with some prior "sentiment" (a.k.a. prior belief), and use then use data to update your "sentiment".

In turn, invalid data would mean that you'd revert back to your original prior sentiment, and when you get new data you'd start Bayesian inference once again.

Edit: Looking at the on-the-ground investigative reporting and the other sources and studies they've cited in the related articles, I actually agree that they have decent evidence to support their belief without these data sets.[0][1]

I mean, ignoring the data sets, would you argue against the idea that many people in cities can't afford broadband or that many places in rural America have crummy internet infrastructure? Certainly, I'm less confident than I would be with the additional data, but my confidence is still relatively high without it.

I do agree with your other points. Mobile internet access--with or without hotspots--is unreasonably ignored. The conflation between access and usage was a lesser concern since I managed to navigate the articles well enough.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-a...

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...

jack6e• 9 years ago

Your point reminds me of an anecdote from a talk [1] shared on HN a few days ago [2] where the speaker quoted Saul Bellow on FDR's fireside chats as saying people were "not considering but affirming" their content. The point of that article was expressing similarities between the adoption of radio and that of the internet, and in that particular anecdote showing that one of the dangers of radio was its ability to communicate with, and persuade people by emotion and sentiment more than facts. Poignant, then, to see an example like this where the internet likewise is interested in swaying by sentiment rather than, even in place of, facts.

Although, in some ways, what FiveThirtyEight is saying is worse than the Bellow quotation. They have not just "not considered," but have re-considered and decided to disregard the facts, while affirming what they originally wanted those facts to demonstrate. Just take their example of D.C., where they used a number that said there was 28.8% coverage, when in reality the coverage is 70%+. How can they then justify the sentiment that even metropolitan places like D.C. lack coverage?

The discrepancy, in their words, comes from totally different definitions: "We looked into it and found that the data set we used had a fundamentally different understanding of broadband access than other sources did." That FiveThirtyEight would stand by a sentiment derived from one definition of broadband coverage, and apply it to a definition that yields entirely different, indeed contradictory, data, seems irresponsible.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106331

basseq• 9 years ago

Read a different way, they have a hypothesis they set out to prove or disprove. Their experiment was flawed and the data thrown out, so the hypothesis is neither confirmed nor disproved. It's still a hypothesis, and one backed by more anecdotal evidence. It would be disingenuous to suggest it's false without evidence supporting same. I think they were transparent and logical in their reporting.

ACow_Adonis• 9 years ago

I just wanted to comment that I think this is brilliant and the kind of analysis and general skeptical of data we should see more of.

Just for context,of its not obvious, I work with data. Both putting it together and analyzing it. And one of my chief frustrations with academia (and biggest lessons to people I advise) is a kind of "cultural reverence for the data set".

Just because data is collected, in no way does that assure that's it's right or suitable, even if the valuable name says it is.

Be skeptics. Private suppliers have incentive to sell you data. Private industries have incentives to keep data from you (it constitutes competitive advantage). Government data has political interference on what is collected, even if you're lucky enough to live in a world where the actual collection is independent and rigorous. Reporters and responses to surveys and interviews may be innacurate even when people thought they were being honest, and on socially contentious topics they usually don't have that.

And even if you managed to avoid all that, it doesn't mean your data isn't problematic. Our census in my country, for example, is done in the winter time. How good is that at tracking information in seasonal towns?

Proper data collection is some of the hardest work you can do, and proper analysis comes from measuring, corroborating, justifying, hypothesising on the data you have. It does not involve just calculating a stat or, god forbid, just testing things for statistical significance just because it's on your data set.

For all those reasons, I highly commend this article. We need more of it.

samstave• 9 years ago

Personally - there is something that I would like:

A monitor of exactly how much traffic is used by ads vs content.

So if I load a page, and say that page is just an article with text. What % of the content is the bandwidth-consumption I am interested vs the ads surrounding it?

The reason why this number is important is Mobile.

So a user signs up for "3 gigs of data" - how much of that 3 gigs is consumed by ads and shit they dont want/need?

Actually - it would be good to have a standard on reporting for any given page "this page weighs in at 50KB for content and 500KB for ads..."

Does this exist?

bluetwo2• 9 years ago

Large providers do scrape this kind of information, but I'm not sure anyone discloses it.

jinma• 9 years ago

Kudos to FiveThirtyEight on being transparent and analyzing what happened. But also...this was a series of mistakes, some of them pretty scary.

FiveThirtyEight's biggest mistake seems to be trusting an academic dataset when they had no idea how it was collected. This is understandable, especially when the data was published on the Arizona State University's Center for Policy Informatics data portal. (You can go there right now and download the bad data - scroll to CATALIST DATA here https://policyinformatics.asu.edu/broadband-data-portal/data...) A university should be a trusted source. But FiveThirtyEight took an unbelievable outlier from this dataset and wrote an entire post about it (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...). The dataset claims that only 29% of Washington D.C.'s adults have broadband. (The real number according to the other datasets FiveThirtyEight looked at in the new post is closer to 70%.) They even make a point of how extreme the Washington D.C. datapoint is on the histogram in the article as the only large county with such a low percent. That should be a clue to question your data.

What I find worse is that the academic researchers published this dataset. They bought behavioral marketing data and trusted a salesperson that the variable HTIA (“Denotes interest in ‘high tech’ products and/or services as reported via Share Force. This would include personal computers and internet service providers. Blended with modeled data.”) was a good proxy for broadband access. To be clear, HTIA includes modeled data, which means they took demographics, voting records, and whatever other individual data they could grab (maybe they have records of your purchases, I'm just guessing), and predicted whether each adult in the US was interested in tech. This is the kind of data companies buy for ad campaigns, figuring that if they advertise to these adults, it might be better than random. There's no reason to think the aggregates of these numbers would be accurate or calibrated correctly, especially for an entirely different purpose (broadband vs high tech).

It's disturbing that these sort of datasets are floating out there in academia and really makes you wonder what other bad data is being blindly trusted to write blog posts, research papers, and news articles.

bluetwo2• 9 years ago

I don't recall which FCC action it was last year, but as I recall, the large providers are no longer required to at least show they attempted to offer broadband to all households.

Previously they had to show state and fed gov't this info. Now they get to concentrate on providing access to the most profitable while ignoring the less profitable.

We Used Broadband Data We Shouldn’t Have

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