Monday, December 14th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, December 14, 2009 - Broadband Census Data announced the availability of highly granular Census block mapping services to state recipients of broadband mapping grants.
BroadbandCensus.com provides the information necessary for states to meet grant obligations under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It does this by identifying:
- carriers;
- internet technologies;
- advertised speeds;
- prices; and
- the presence or absence of broadband within each Census block.
Using BroadbandCensus.com, a state can fully map the broadband footprint of its carriers within 42 days, for a fraction of the budget allocated by the Recovery Act.
And the cost is less than what a state might otherwise expect for a product of this caliber.
BroadbandCensus.com builds its broadband maps by blending multiple data sets of publicly-available information.
These sources include:
- Wireline footprints;
- Radio-frequency engineering maps;
- Publicly-available carrier data;
- Survey-grade research; and
- Crowdsourced data.
The data underlying BroadbandCensus.com is verifiable, publicly available, and granular to the Census block level.
BroadbandCensus.com can also go beyond the Census block level and offer consumer broadband data at the rooftop level. This survey-grade information is no more than six months old.
Unlike compiled consumer data built for direct marketing, the BroadbandCensus.com suite of services makes use of active household demographic data.
Working in collaboration with Brian Webster Consulting, Broadband Census Data...
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Monday, December 7th, 2009
WASHINGTON, December 7, 2009 - A new
report using an innovative approach to broadband data finds that the percentage of households in the United States that have adopted high-speed internet services is 72.9 percent.
The report was generated by comparing the Census blocks in which broadband is available with the number of subscribers that carriers report to the Federal Communications Commission.
By linking the number of subscribers in a particular state (from FCC data) to a data-set of Census block-by-Census block tabulations of broadband availability, consultant Brian Webster believes that he is able to peg the nation-wide broadband adoption rate for homes passed at 72.9 percent.
That number is about 10 percentage points higher than what other studies have found. That's not surprising - precisely because he is attempting to count adoption of homes passed, and not of the population as a whole.
“That’s a difference that could have a significant impact on the decisions made to deploy broadband in the remaining un-served markets,” says Webster.
One other facet to the data used in the report: the FCC data used in the report also includes mobile broadband counts, in addition to wireline broadband counts. Because a home could have two or more broadband...
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 30, 2009 -
The news that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration aims to seek access to the Form 477 database is positive news -- providing that the public obtains access to the database, too.
Even before the founding of BroadbandCensus.com more than two years ago, the individuals associated with the data side of BroadbandCensus.com have been urging the public disclosure of basic broadband data. We call this the Broadband SPARC: for Speeds, Prices, Availability, Reliability and Competition.
In comments
in July 2008, BroadbandCensus.com urged greater disclosure of this data.
We repeated these comments, adding a new twist - that a National Broadband Plan must be accompanied by a National Broadband Mashup -
in June 2009.
As readers of BroadbandBreakfast.com are aware, Broadband Census LLC has recently split our operations between our news and events, which we publish on BroadbandBreakfast.com, and our data operations, which continues on BroadbandCensus.com.
BroadbandBreakfast.com continues our tradition of reliable news reporting, as BroadbandCensus.com continues to urge disclosure and - through our mapping from publicly-available sources - create the best possible database of broadband speeds, prices, availability, reliability and competition.
The news of the NTIA's interest in the Form 477...
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