nov08c.indd


W. Alston Roberts III W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n e  

Broadband Census for America Symposium 
Ed. note: On September 26, Timothy Vollmer, 

information technology policy analyst for 

the ALA Office of Information Technology 

Policy, attended a half­day event hosted by 

Broadbandcensus.com. The title was straight­

forward and direct, wasting no time to get to 

the point—“Broadband Census for America.” 

The following content provides a snapshot of 

Vollmer’s experience at the event, highlighting 

the importance of improved broadband to the 

future of libraries and the public in general. 

Broadband Census for America was organized 

to “seek to improve our understanding of current 

practices in broadband data collection and dis­

cuss ways of improving and expanding publicly­

available data within the United States.” 

Rachelle Chong, current California state 

public utilities commissioner and former FCC 

commissioner, reinforced a mantra heard 

throughout the day—organizations need access 

to robust, accurate broadband data to support 

efforts to better connect consumers. Chong said 

California’s broadband initiatives receive strong 

support from state policymakers, including 

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who created 

a state broadband task force to identify barri­

ers and map wireline and wireless broadband 

availability. In carrying out this mission, Chong 

found that carriers were often reluctant to pro­

vide data. Chong even had to sign nondisclosure 

agreements with many of the broadband carriers 

in order to receive street­level data. Later, this 

information had to be aggregated and the raw 

data destroyed. Eventually, the task force was 

able to map competing broadband providers in 

every census tract in California. 

Many speakers championed the idea that 

broadband is infrastructure. Chong connected 

broadband to development: ”If you don’t 

support broadband, you’re not going to have 

W. Alston Roberts III is communications director at ALA’s 
Washington Offi  ce, e-mail: wroberts@alawash.org. This 
month’s column was written by Tim Vollmer, information 
technology policy analyst at ALA’s Washington Offi  ce, 
e-mail: tvollmer@ala.org  

state­of­the­art technological innovation.” She 

observed that access to broadband is only the 

first step, we need to tackle the problem of af­

fordability, too. Further, she said that it is neces­

sary for politicians to understand that broadband 

is a critical infrastructure. If lawmakers think the 

Internet is a mere “luxury”—and not an essential 

infrastructural component like the electrical 

grid—they’re not going to fund it. 

Art Brodsky, communications director at 

Public Knowledge, said that broadband data 

gathering and mapping efforts need to relay the 

best information available. “To do this right,” he 

said, “we can’t have voluntary data collection.” 

He said that in Maryland, carriers have been 

extremely reluctant to provide broadband data, 

even going so far as to claim that revealing in­

formation about networks could pose a threat 

to national security (supposedly terrorists could 

strike the infrastructure). 

Drew Clark, executive director of Broadband­

census.com, said that the public is served best by 

the greatest possible disclosure of information. 

He warned that even though FCC collects a lot 

of detailed information, they refuse to release 

some of the data, mainly due to confi dentiality 

complaints from carriers. But, by harnessing the 

power of consumer crowd­sourcing, Broadband­

census.com allows a user to not only take an 

Internet speed test, but also provide information 

about his or her provider and submit comments 

about quality of service or other issues. 

John Windhausen, president of Telepoly 

Consulting and ALA consultant, extended the 

idea of broadband as a fundamental infrastruc­

ture for an information society to libraries, fo­

cusing on issues of connection quality. He said 

that even though a public library may have a 

T1 connection, the fact that the connection is 

shared by a large number of simultaneous users 

can slow it to a crawl. This alternate facet of the 

broadband connectivity problem may require 

us to examine data collection in terms of the 

user experience, not only institutional access to 

a pipe. In this situation, he asked, “How much 

bandwidth is enough?” 

C&RL News November 2008  638 

http:census.com
http:census.com
mailto:tvollmer@ala.org
mailto:wroberts@alawash.org
http:Broadbandcensus.com