Fiber Broadband Association delivers geospatial fibre tools to its community members
Deborah Kish of Fiber Broadband Association
Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) has announced a suite of Broadbandtoolkit.com geospatial planning tools for FBA members to visualise existing broadband deployments and areas of opportunity. Members now have the capability to access several tools through FBA’s Research and Resources library.
These tools include the fibre finder, fibre strategy toolkit, and national hex toolkit. They enable members to identify the present broadband technology coverage, variations in service quality, locate BEAD (broadband equity, access, and deployment)-eligible areas, and formulate data-driven strategies. These strategies are aimed at bridging the connectivity gap for Americans who are currently unserved or underserved.
According to the FCC, more than 8.3 million US homes and businesses lack access to high-speed broadband. To ensure all Americans can access the opportunities and economic benefits of high-quality broadband services, it is imperative that policymakers, investors, and broadband providers can visualise where fibre and other broadband technology deployments are present and understand the key differences in the quality of deployments.
“We are thrilled to provide our members with access to these geospatial tools, so they can easily visualise opportunities for expansion, refine their deployment strategies, and connect more communities to high-quality fibre broadband,” says Deborah Kish, vice president of research and workforce development at Fiber Broadband Association. “As all types of broadband providers are preparing their initial BEAD proposals, this type of data is very timely and extremely valuable in assessing the regions where fibre broadband is needed most.”
The suite of geospatial planning tools enables members to visualise US locations passed by fibre and other BEAD-eligible technologies, the performance and depth of fibre deployments, and where eligible unserved and underserved project areas exist. The three tools include:
- Fibre finder geospatial business planning solution enables broadband providers, manufacturers, state broadband offices, federal regulators, and others to see the extent of residential and business fibre deployments in the US. The solution leverages data from the May 2023 release of FCC broadband data collection (BDC) and shows locations passed by holding company and by state or territory.
- The fibre strategy toolkit takes geospatial planning one step further to visualise the presence, performance, and depth of fibre deployments.
- The national hex toolkit expands deployment visualisation capabilities to all BEAD eligible technologies, including fibre, cable, copper, and licensed fixed wireless terrestrial networks in the US It includes BEAD compliance layers based on NTIA BEAD NOFO (notice of funding opportunity) definitions and recent federal data sets.
These planning tools are the latest addition to a library of research and resources FBA offers its members. FBA recently launched The BEAD Threshold Cost Model with Cartesian, which helps state broadband offices calculate their Extremely High Cost Per Location Threshold (ECHT) for BEAD-funded fibre broadband deployments.
To learn more about FBA’s research and resources, visit here.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter @IoTGN