New Maps Help Set Priorities for Broadband Deployment

In 2018, Congress provided funding to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to create a National Broadband Availability Map (NBAM) and to work with Federal Communications Commissionas well as state and local governments, nonprofits, network owners and operators and other stakeholders to achieve this goal. So far, 40 states and territories have provided data to NTIA. But much of this data is from resident surveys or requests for service collected via web portals, says William Rinehart, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity. It might be more than was previously known, but it’s still missing important details; moreover, the data is not available to researchers. One state took a more comprehensive approach to tracking coverage and shared its data set. Rinehart used this work as the basis for a national projection. In June 2021, the state of Georgia published a broadband availability map created by overlapping the location of every home and business in the state with broadband service available to those locations. The work of creating the map was overseen by the Institute of Government at the University of Georgia. The map, the first of its kind, revealed coverage gaps that were not apparent in FCC data.