Fiber Broadband Association Delivers Geospatial Fiber Planning Tools to Fiber Broadband Community

The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) announced a suite of Broadbandtoolkit.com geospatial planning tools for FBA members to visualize existing broadband deployments and areas of opportunity. Members can now access Fiber Finder, the Fiber Strategy Toolkit, and the National Hex Toolkit through FBA’s Research and Resources library to identify the current reach of broadband technologies, understand key differences in quality of service, find Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD)-eligible areas, and develop data-driven strategies to connect Americans that are unserved or underserved. The suite of geospatial planning tools enables members to visualize U.S. locations passed by fiber and other BEAD-eligible technologies, the performance and depth of fiber deployments, and where eligible unserved and underserved project areas exist. The three tools include:

• Fiber Finder geospatial business planning solution enables broadband providers, manufacturers, state broadband offices, federal regulators, and others to see the extent of residential and business fiber deployments in the US. The solution leverages data from the May 2023 release of the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Data Collection (BDC) and shows locations passed by holding company and by state or territory;
• The Fiber Strategy Toolkit takes geospatial planning one step further to visualize the presence, performance, and depth of fiber deployments;
• The National Hex Toolkit expands deployment visualization capabilities to all BEAD-eligible technologies, including fiber, cable, copper, and licensed fixed wireless terrestrial networks in the US. It includes BEAD compliance layers based on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) definitions and recent federal data sets.