Measuring broadband shouldn’t be this hard

The Government Accountability Office has discovered what pretty much everyone in telecom already knew: Despite the best efforts of bureaucrats and broadband advocates, we don’t really have solid data about broadband deployment and speeds that can be used to make national or international comparisons.

That’s a prime reason many are dismissive of the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development’s rankings, which put the US 15^th in broadband penetration globally. They just aren’t counting right, OECD critics sniff...