NEWS Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street, S.W. Washington, D. C. 20554 This is an unofficial announcement of Commission action. Release of the full text of a Commission order constitutes official action. See MCI v. FCC. 515 F 2d 385 (D.C. Circ 1974). News Media Information 202 / 418-0500 Internet: http://www.fcc.gov TTY: 1-888-835-5322 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: December 24, 2013 Mark Wigfield at (202) 418-0253 Email: mark.wigfield@fcc.gov FCC RELEASES NEW DATA ON INTERNET ACCESS SERVICES Washington, D.C. – The Federal Communications Commission has released its latest report on Internet access service connections in the United States. Titled Internet Access Services, the report is based on data submitted by service providers every six months on FCC Form 477. The report tracks changes at the state and national level in the number of subscribers to Internet access service in 72 different combinations of speed tiers. The report includes data collected by the FCC through December 31, 2012. Highlights from the Internet Access Services report include the following: · Internet connections overall are growing. The number of connections over 200 kbps in at least one direction increased by 14% year-over-year to nearly 262 million. · At year-end 2012, there were almost 65 million fixed and 64 million mobile connections with downstream speeds at or above 3 Mbps and upstream speeds at or above 768 kbps, as compared to 51 million fixed and 31 million mobile connections a year earlier. · The number of connections with downstream speeds of at least 10 Mbps increased by 35% over December 2011, to 60 million connections. · Growth is particularly high in mobile Internet subscriptions. The number of mobile subscriptions with speeds over 200 kbps in at least one direction grew to more than 169 million – up 19% from December 2011. The number of fixed-location connections at speeds over 200 kbps in at least one direction increased by 5% year-over-year to nearly 93 million. The report also uses census tract-level information collected on FCC Form 477 to estimate the percentages of households located in census tracts where zero, one, two, or three or more providers reported residential fixed-location connections of several different speeds in December 2012. In doing so, however, the report emphasizes that a provider that reports residential fixed- location connections of a particular speed in a particular census tract may not necessarily offer service at that speed everywhere in the census tract. Accordingly, the number of providers does not necessarily reflect the number of choices available to a particular household and does not measure competition. This caveat equally applies to the report’s estimated percentages of households in census tracts where providers reported purchased residential fixed-location connections of different speeds or reported operating a mobile wireless network capable of sending or receiving data at different speeds. Moreover, as previously announced, the Commission has released its first public version of the FCC Speed Test app for Android smartphones. This addition to the Measuring Broadband America program will provide consumers with information about their own mobile broadband speeds and assist the Commission in assessing mobile broadband performance nationwide. The Commission in June adopted changes to its FCC Form 477 program to assume responsibility for the collection of data on broadband deployment, an effort currently overseen by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) in coordination with the States, and to implement a new approach for reporting broadband connection speeds of fixed and mobile services. The Commission expects that the first filings of this new information will be due at the FCC in September 2014 (representing data as of June 2014). Additional information about changes coming to the FCC Form 477 is available at http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/changes- coming-form-477-data-collection. The Internet Access Services report is available at http://transition.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/stats.html in the New Releases section of the page as well as in the Local Telephone Competition and Broadband Deployment section. It is also available for reference in the FCC’s Reference Information Center, Courtyard Level, 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC, 20554. Copies may be purchased by calling Best Copy and Printing, Inc. at (800) 378-3160. - FCC - Wireline Competition Bureau contacts: James Eisner and Suzanne Mendez at (202) 418-0940, TTY (202) 418-0484.