The FCC released the new maps on Friday of last week, and I’m ready to share the first version of an aggregated analysis. I’ll provide the top lines here and more detailed methodology and caveats are below. Overall, there are 112 million Broadband Serviceable Locations (BSLs) in the country (excluding territories). 6.9% of the BSLs are unserved, which is 7.7 million. 5.3% of the BSLs are underserved, or 6.0 million nationally.
Thank you for sharing these analyses of the FCC data. I work in local government and am attempting to summarize the facts around the FCC data for our elected officials and community. I am not an expert on internet service by any means. This national context is really helpful. I have a methodological question about binning the speeds into "best available" categories. I assume this is a boolean test considering both the upload and the download reported. Is that understanding correct? For example, if a provider reported internet speeds at 100 down, 10 up, that would go into the 25/3+ category, since it falls short of 20 up? Same for 1,000/10?
I started to look at data by Provider, to see how well the Tier-1, Tier-2, and MSOs actual deployment numbers track against what they've stated publicly (as well as finding out how much FTTH they've deployed when they don't disclose that to shareholders). The datasets are too big for Excel,although I can get some data out of pivot tables. Unfortunately, I have to put this aside for lack of time.
There's a lot of understanding of the US access networks buried in there for GIS, but for the fact that locations are geocoded only to the census block rather that Lat-Lon or street address. To unlock that data requires a license from CostQuest (!!!), which I doubt is available to researchers. Supposedly at some point, there is supposed to be a click-through license to Lat-Lon.
I wasn't aware that a BSL could be an apartment building, rather than all of the units inside the building. That would make it really difficult to quantify how many households are actually unserved.
And don't get me started on the topic of apartment building owners who won't allow carriers who are at the curb to deploy in their buildings. Grrr.
Congrats for downloading the whole dataset. I have been trying to do that, but my program is still running. I didn't notice some of the data missing that you flagged; for example, I downloaded data for CO cable providers. A few data sets didn't download properly, but otherwise it seems complete to me (at least so far). However, one thing I haven't found is anything that I can download with unserved locations. Where did you find that information? Thanks.
Hi Mike,
Thank you for sharing these analyses of the FCC data. I work in local government and am attempting to summarize the facts around the FCC data for our elected officials and community. I am not an expert on internet service by any means. This national context is really helpful. I have a methodological question about binning the speeds into "best available" categories. I assume this is a boolean test considering both the upload and the download reported. Is that understanding correct? For example, if a provider reported internet speeds at 100 down, 10 up, that would go into the 25/3+ category, since it falls short of 20 up? Same for 1,000/10?
Thank you! Looking forward to more updates!
Sara in Oregon
Mike,
Thanks for this. Do you know where we can find the underlying dataset that this aggregate spreadsheet was built from. Thanks!
Cheers,
Bryan
Mike,
This is great!
I started to look at data by Provider, to see how well the Tier-1, Tier-2, and MSOs actual deployment numbers track against what they've stated publicly (as well as finding out how much FTTH they've deployed when they don't disclose that to shareholders). The datasets are too big for Excel,although I can get some data out of pivot tables. Unfortunately, I have to put this aside for lack of time.
There's a lot of understanding of the US access networks buried in there for GIS, but for the fact that locations are geocoded only to the census block rather that Lat-Lon or street address. To unlock that data requires a license from CostQuest (!!!), which I doubt is available to researchers. Supposedly at some point, there is supposed to be a click-through license to Lat-Lon.
Regards,
Dan
I wasn't aware that a BSL could be an apartment building, rather than all of the units inside the building. That would make it really difficult to quantify how many households are actually unserved.
And don't get me started on the topic of apartment building owners who won't allow carriers who are at the curb to deploy in their buildings. Grrr.
This is a great update & much appreciated.
Congrats for downloading the whole dataset. I have been trying to do that, but my program is still running. I didn't notice some of the data missing that you flagged; for example, I downloaded data for CO cable providers. A few data sets didn't download properly, but otherwise it seems complete to me (at least so far). However, one thing I haven't found is anything that I can download with unserved locations. Where did you find that information? Thanks.