Thanks to the heads up from Jeff Pesek from Tech.MN on ID Insight’s latest broadband access reports. I’ve written about ID Insight before; they are the Minnesota-based company that does a lot of broadband mapping. In the past their research has alligned fairly closely to Connect Minnesota’s maps – altohugh they come at the information differently. Their latest report (which is really a spotlight on broadband mapping in Arizona) details the difference between how they track broadbanc access…

Unlike the NTIA map which was generated primarily as the result of collecting coverage data and advertised speeds directly from the carriers, Scout was created by looking at over a half a billion consumer internet transactions that link the consumer’s physical address to their internet provider through their Internet Protocol (IP) address. In short, Scout is an independent survey of internet connectivity that today covers approximately 15% of all internet households in the country.

When we compare Scout to the NTIA map, there are some interesting differences:

• Because Scout sees raw transactions, we cannot only measure availability but usage at the most granular geographic level.
• Scout sees all internet providers, including dial-up connections which are not reported to NTIA.
• When we measure speed, we are measuring actual speeds that have been measured for the IP address.
• Because we are looking at millions of transactions, Scout observes nearly every carrier as opposed to the carriers that chose to participate and send their data to the states.

Here are some of the difference they note in their Arizona report versus the National Broadband Map’s info on Arizona:

• 95 percent of the time, the Arizona map and Broadband Scout agree with respect to broadband coverage. However, when we isolate the more rural counties, only 85 percent of the time do they agree.
• Only 74 percent of the targeted providers contributed data. Of the targeted providers, BroadBand Scout observed 96 percent of the providers.
• When considering the largest providers, BroadBand Scout observed providers both overreporting, and others under-reporting, some by as much as 400 percent.
• When considering broadband speeds being delivered, BroadBand Scout observed that only 50 percent of the most rural counties had actual broadband speeds above 5 mbps combined versus 100 percent reported on the Arizona map, which reports “available” speed.

I don’t know Arizona well enough to comment but I did notice that ID Insight reports that 87 percent of Minnesota providers provided information for the National Broadband Maps. I think that number is actually 90 percent and I think that even 90 percent maybe misleading as I think they have participation from the largest providers. So it’s not that 10 percent of the state is going unreported – but 10 percent of the providers.

That being said, it is nice to see data from multiple resources.