From 2011 to 2016, the FCC released an annual report comparing advertised broadband speeds with actual speeds but has not released one in two years
but the @FCC hasn't published new data from its gear in consumers' homes to test ISP speeds, & stonewalled @arstechnica's FOIA request: http://arstechnica.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Between 2011 and 2016 the FCC ran an annual measurement program that put test gear in consumers' homes and published how ISP advertised speeds stacked up against reality. That cadence broke after 2016, and when Ars Technica filed a FOIA request for the consumer-home speed data, the agency refused to comply.
The gap matters because the FCC's own numbers have been moving targets: it counted 34 million Americans without fixed broadband at its 25/3 benchmark in early 2016, and later had to correct its deployment data upward to 21.3 million unconnected at the end of 2017 after an error overstated coverage. Speed and deployment reporting is the evidentiary base for whether ISPs are delivering what they sell.
First-order effects
- ISPs face no current public accounting of advertised-versus-actual speeds, removing the annual reputational check that ran from 2011 through 2016.
- Ars Technica's FOIA request goes unanswered, leaving journalists and researchers without the raw consumer-home measurements the FCC itself collected.
Second-order effects
- When the agency finally surfaced the data — buried in appendices of another report rather than as a standalone release — it showed some DSL lines still failing to hit promised "up-to" speeds, confirming the withheld measurements were materially relevant to consumers.
- A pattern of favorable self-assessment takes hold: the same reporting apparatus that understated the unconnected population by millions now concludes deployment is reasonable and timely, shifting scrutiny onto independent measurement efforts.
Third-order effects
- If the standalone annual report stays retired, broadband accountability migrates from routine government disclosure to ad hoc releases, press-driven FOIAs, and corrected errata — weakening the shared factual baseline used to judge ISP performance and set deployment policy.
The trend: Federal broadband oversight is drifting from regular, standardized public measurement toward discretionary and reactive disclosure, with the accuracy of the FCC's own deployment counts already proven fragile.