Are You Served?

Jessica Hatch is the County of Door broadband coordinator.

Answering that and other questions will help Door County gain more funding to provide better internet service

Some in Door County are fully aware that their internet service can best be described as dismal. Others may not be aware that their address is considered underserved or even unserved.

In other words, in the world of broadband, you may be worse off than you realize.

To talk with Jessica Hatch, the County of Door’s broadband coordinator, is to learn that even if you pay close to $90 per month for satellite internet service, you are, technically, among the left-behind.

“You are considered unserved automatically with satellite service because of the latencies,” or time delays, that it takes for data to travel between the sender and receiver, Hatch said.

But it’s not just satellite internet service that’s not delivering the minimum broadband speeds set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of 25 Mbps (megabytes per second) download and 3 Mbps upload. Even those speeds no longer meet the needs of internet users, the FCC acknowledged in a Notice of Inquiry it posted last month that proposes increasing the minimum speed metric to 100/20. Few services in Door County meet the former definition, and those that do meet it are believed to be confined to the City of Sturgeon Bay and parts of downtown areas in Door County’s villages and towns, according to the Door County Broadband Assessment completed last year. 

That’s why Hatch is urging the inhabitants of all addresses in Door County, whether residence or business, to take an online survey that will report their internet service quality and prove without a doubt that the majority of the peninsula is unserved.

“Both locations count – business and home,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you rent or own.”

The survey is being conducted by the Wiser Wisconsin Internet Self-Report from the Wisconsin Broadband Office. The survey reports on internet service quality directly to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin. The survey and speed test, which take about 10 minutes, will help to identify whether broadband access is available at the person’s street address, and if it is, they will measure the performance each address is receiving.

In turn, the County of Door will get the data needed for local municipalities to prove need. That’s important because billions of dollars are being rolled out by the federal government to fund broadband infrastructure. The federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, provides $42.45 billion to expand high-speed internet access across the country. That’s in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants that are also being dispersed by other state and federal agencies to deliver broadband access to all Americans.

The federal BEAD program – and other broadband-granting agencies – will prioritize funding to unserved, rural areas based on updated broadband-access maps available in early 2023. Currently, those FCC maps don’t accurately show where broadband service is available because they were created using a method that allowed broadband providers to report service to an entire census block, even if only one household in that census block was served. 

That will change with the Broadband Data Act that became federal law in March 2020, mandating new ways for broadband data to be collected, verified and reported. It will create more accurate maps, Hatch said, but the law also allows organizations and individuals to submit data that challenges the accuracy of the information that broadband providers are reporting. 

“The Wisconsin Broadband Office will be able to say, ‘We have this data from Door County. Their [current] maps are inaccurate, and here is why,’” Hatch said. “It will help municipalities be able to receive funding for grants and higher levels of funding if they’re proving how unserved they are.” 

Hatch’s office launched news of the Wiser Wisconsin survey on July 29, and as of last week, about 450 people in Door County had taken it.

“Geographically, most of the data points are shoreline,” Hatch said. “We have few responses from inland, so we need more from inland.” In addition, “we only have 22 business locations that responded,” she said. “That’s just not enough.”

Fifty percent of those initial respondents reported service that did not meet the federal definition of broadband service. Only 55 of those respondents reported sufficient speeds. That small sampling supports estimates that only about 10% of the county has adequate service.

“That’s why people need to take the survey, because the whole county is underserved,” Hatch said.

There’s no deadline to take the survey. Federal funding will take a while to disburse, and meanwhile, more and more data can be compiled.

Hatch also prompted all property and business owners to let their town and village boards know that broadband is a need, not a luxury.

“They have to be a squeaky wheel,” Hatch said. “They just do. That’s the only way to get their boards to listen.”

Take the Survey

All inhabitants of Door County addresses, whether residence or business, are urged to take an online survey to report their internet service quality directly to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin. The survey takes about 10 minutes, includes a speed test and will be used to advise Wisconsin’s broadband planning efforts. Access the survey at maps.psc.wi.gov/apps/WISER/index.html.

Find out more about the survey and the County of Door’s broadband efforts at fibernetdoorcounty.org.