The Daily Yonder: Do You Really Have the Broadband the FCC Thinks You Have?

Date: 22 Dec 2022 | posted in: Media Coverage | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Two members of ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks team—Sean Gonsalves, Senior Reporter, Editor, and Communications Team Lead, and Christine Parker, GIS and Data Visualization Specialist—contributed an editorial to The Daily Yonder. An excerpt of the article, which was originally published on December 22, 2022, follows:

Living as a retiree in rural Western Pennsylvania, John Ferketic has come to understand something the pandemic made crystal clear to all of us: high-speed Internet connectivity (broadband access) is essential to fully participate in the 21st century.

Unfortunately for Ferketic, and millions more like him, he lives on the wrong side of the digital divide.

At his Venango County home in Kenderdell, halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, Ferketic has grown increasingly frustrated with his slow Internet connection – an experience recently highlighted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette documenting an all-too-common occurrence across rural America.

When he went online recently to check the Federal Communication Commission (FCC)new broadband availability map, his home was shown to be adequately served – not by one – but by three different Internet service providers (ISPs).

The thing is: Mr. Ferketic knows that the FCC map is ‘totally incorrect, grossly wrong.’

Read the full article here.

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Andrew Frank was the Digital Communications Manager at ILSR, where he worked to maximize the reach of the organization’s initiatives, research, and reporting online.