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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments are misunderstanding the point of the map and think it's supposed to be perfectly accurate.

No, that's not at all the point. The point is to allow individuals and businesses to challenge telecom self-attestations of coverage that are likely suspect. So if e.g SpaceX says you're currently served by Starlink but it turns out Starlink is refusing you on their site until the middle of next year, you can challenge the accuracy of Starlink's coverage map.

Starlink used as an example. You can challenge anything, but so far I've had to challenge Starlink at every address I'm responsible for.

Over time the map should be reliable, but for now, look for the Location Challenge and Availability Challenge links to see your options if you think a provider is misrepresenting coverage.

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We like to complain and not read the about page.

"This map displays where Internet services are available across the United States, as reported by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to the FCC. The map will be updated continuously to improve its accuracy through a combination of FCC verification efforts, new data from Internet providers, updates to the location data, and—importantly—information from the public."

Arguably, the large federal government agency that we put lots of tax dollars into shouldn't be basing it's regulation on a map that requires significant donated time and effort, from large amounts of the public, to have any accuracy.

The reality is that this map and effort was purposely done in a stupid and ineffective way as part of an effort by certain (FCC and/or presidential) administrations to say "No we don't need any more regulation, look at this map, america has the best internet".

> Arguably, the large federal government agency that we put lots of tax dollars into shouldn't be basing it's regulation on a map that requires significant donated time and effort, from large amounts of the public, to have any accuracy.

What's your estimate on how many dollars it would take for the FCC to annually and independently validate connectivity at every address?

Exactly this. I filed an FCC complaint regarding speeds at my house and got Spectrum off their ass and investigating. Our neighborhood is a new build with fiber instead of coax that should be getting 500mbit upload on their Gig plan but not all houses receive it, mine included. Finally spoke to a local supervisor yesterday after going through first line support for over a week and he noticed that people even on the same node receive it while I'm stuck at 35mbit upload so that's progress and hopefully a catalyst for getting it resolved finally.

It just looks sad right now: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/063d05b6-eae5-4534-99a3-f... -- that upload is pitiful for fiber.

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