[Bloat] Fwd: Here's how the Broadband Fabric should be built.

[Dave Taht]

a good day for open data.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Sascha Meinrath <sascha at thexlab.org>
Date: Wed, May 10, 2023 at 7:30 AM
Subject: Here's how the Broadband Fabric should be built.
To: National Broadband Mapping Coalition <bbcoalition at marconisociety.org>


Hi Everyone,

A national team of GIS experts have been collaborating on an open source,
address-level, free broadband availability map -- the PA beta is now live here:

     https://internetxplorer.org

***

As you will quickly see, the map has information down to the address level --
and it enables easy zooming to whichever level you're interested in (unlike the
FCC's map). *AND* we have also pointed out households that *should* be in the
Fabric but are not (along with a bunch of highway mile markers that will need to
be cleaned out -- an artifact of pulling locations from E911 databases). Most of
the Turquoise dots represent challenges that should have been made -- and there
are areas in North Central and SW PA where there are thousands upon thousands of
households currently missing from the Fabric data.

This map is freely and publicly available for non-commercial use, and it's built
with open source code -- so we'd welcome both collaborators, re-use by more
states, inquiries from devs who want to help, as well as your feedback (there's
a handy "reach out" link at the top of the map that'll e-mail the team).

The dev team is particularly keen to accelerate additional features (e.g.,
drawing an arbitrary polygon and having it compute # of households, # & %
unserved, # & % underserved; and mash-ups with demographic data from the 2020
census [which would enable the first-ever empirical look at de facto digital
redlining]).

Long story short, this was pulled together by an independent team because the
country and state continues to misappropriate funding for disastrously unusable
broadband maps. We wanted to back up our critique by demonstrating what is
possible. This particular map is purpose-built to show eligible areas for the PA
Capital Project Fund RFP (coming out today), but it serves as an exemplar
showing how feasible building an free and open, accessible, cheaper, and more
usable map actually is.

I hope folks like it.

Best,

--Sascha

--
Sascha Meinrath
Director, X-Lab
Palmer Chair in Telecommunications
Penn State University

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Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos