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  • Mapping Broadband Coverage in the US
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Mapping Broadband Coverage in the US

The National Broadband Map enables analysts to identify underserved areas and make informed funding decisions.

In January 2009, President Obama set forth an agenda for universal broadband — a plan to make high speed internet service available to all Americans. Congress subsequently directed the FCC to develop a National Broadband Plan to “ensure every American has access to broadband capability.” In a joint effort, the State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) Grant Program set out to collect and disseminate highly granular broadband-related information.  A key milestone was achieved in February, 2011, as the NTIA and FCC launched the National Broadband Map.  Computech built this application to provide the government with a decision-support tool they can use to help the President achieve his goal of ubiquitous, high speed broadband access for Americans.

Challenges:

While the underlying premise of a National Broadband Plan and SBDD has garnered widespread support, policy analysts needed a tool to help identify unserved and underserved areas.  This tool would allow policy analysts to make informed, data-driven broadband funding decisions.  The Recovery Act, through the SBDD Grant Program, provided funding for each state to collect highly-granular broadband availability data, but the data had to be aggregated, standardized, and analyzed.  The government needed to build an application to disseminate the geospatial data to a wide range of users, from general consumers to policy analysts.

Solution:

By disseminating data on the availability, speed, location and type of broadband services available, the National Broadband Map presents broadband data, collected by the SBDD Grant Program, in a straightforward manner with the support of geographic information systems (GIS), visualization techniques and a sleek user experience. It appeals to the novice consumer looking for basic information about broadband availability in their area, as well as to advanced users looking to interact with sophisticated aspects of the site.

By developing the National Broadband Map on a layer of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), developers and engineers are able to consume the broadband data for their own mash-ups and applications. Leveraging Computech’s expertise in geospatial analysis and mapping, data visualization, operations research, statistical data analysis and user experience design, the site provides quantitative information interactively to end-users, allowing for search functionality and the integration of multiple visual experiences. The main features of the site include:

-    A “Search” page that allows users to enter their address and return a list of providers, technologies and speeds available in their area.  The “Search” page also collects feedback from the public based on the information returned to them.

-    An interactive “Maps” page that allows users to view the geospatial data visually on a map.  The maps page allows users to filter coverage by the number of providers available, technology type and broadband speed.

-    An “Analyze” section that allows users to view a variety of broadband related statistics for various geographic levels of aggregation (state, county, congressional district, etc.) and rank these regions based on several broadband attributes.

Computech’s partners in the project extended the firm’s ability to produce advanced visualizations of the broadband data including broadband availability in rural vs. urban areas, areas of higher and lower income, and comparisons of advertised broadband speeds to actual speeds.

Notable Results:

The White House OSTP held a press conference on February 17^th, 2011, to announce the launch of the site, which represents the first completely open and transparent map of broadband availability ever created. The site is also one of the first uses of crowdsourcing by the FCC.

As of this writing, further results are not yet available.

Operations Research-

• Processed over 50 million records of data from 1,650 broadband providers in all 50 states, 5 territories and the District of Columbia
• Gained a thorough understanding of the data, including its nature (quantitative, qualitative, geospatial, etc.), limitations and relationship with other datasets
• Created a data transformation model that transformed the data into usable information that was standardized and consistent in format, content and relationships
• Produced a series of cleansed, practical data tables by transforming the seemingly disparate data into a geographic “common denominator” while incorporating various broadband analytics use cases
• Using a combination of SQL scripts and Statistical Analysis Software (SAS), we used these tables to calculate detailed provider, technology and speed availability statistics in the “Analyze” and “Maps” portions of the website
• Calculated margins of error for all computed statistics
• Conducted a wide variety of exploratory data analysis including correlation, regression and time series analysis

Geographic Information Systems-

• Incorporated data from 56 grantees, including all states, territories and the District of Columbia
• Created first ever seamless national broadband data set, with 25 million polygons in the first release
• Data is refreshed and incorporated into the website every six months
• All the information is available for download; additionally, the website is built on top of publicly available REST APIs, and all web mapping endpoints are available as OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium)
• The website, APIs and mapping resources have been built with open source software
• The team cleaned up delivered data and prepared it for online publication
• The team developed innovative front end mapping tools to present the information
• The team designed and developed a complete set of open RESTful APIs that support both the National Broadband Map and third party applications; some of these APIs are the first at the FCC to provide geospatial functionality to web developers
• The team also developed geospatial crowdsourcing capabilities to incorporate feedback from users about presence of providers and the speeds that they offer