Current FCC maps do not reflect on the ground reality. FCC maps indicate 100% broadband deployment of 25/3 Mbps to households in urban areas of high poverty within the City of Fresno. The CPUC maps indicate deployment of 25/3 Mbps at either 60-80% or 80% and greater within these urban areas of high poverty. The CPUC maps indicate broadband adoption at either 60-80% or 80% and greater within these urban areas of high poverty.
The CPUC maps show that the urban area within the City of Fresno has less than 5,000 underserved residents. Yet, the Fresno Coalition for Digital Inclusion has learned there are 3,700 underserved residents just within the 27 largest Fresno Housing multi-dwelling complexes in the City of Fresno.
There are ways of gathering more accurate and relevant data with greater scale.
- Microsoft uses access to cloud services to determine internet performance based upon actual usage.
- Similar data has been gathered wherein the broadband speed is determined by a speed test from the residents’ device to an internet speed test sample from a service like Ookla.
- Fresno Unified, in collaboration with the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, developed an app that measures students’ internet speeds from a district-issued laptop. This app is called myQoI and samples a student-device’s quality of internet several times a day using speed test samples against the Ookla service. The myQoI app shows the internet speeds and other relevant information using students’ district-issued laptops allowing sampling at large scale across geographic regions.