Ars Technica is reporting that Congress has finally passed the broadband data collection bill. As any good geographer will tell you, normally the first step in figuring out where you want to go is knowing where you’re at. That’s more or less the spirit of this bill. The fact of the matter is that we have terrible knowledge about broadband availability in the US. The data is spotty and misleading. Hopefully this bill will help rectify that, particularly in the mapping arena. No details about standards and how all of this is going to happen, but hopefully those will be quickly forthcoming.