About the Data

BroadbandAtlasUSA is built from the FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC) public-use files and the National Broadband Map public datasets, together with FCC provider reference data and U.S. Census Bureau geography and household counts.

Why area-level, not address-level

The FCC also publishes a proprietary address-level dataset (the Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric) under a restrictive licence. We deliberately do not use it. We use only the datasets the FCC allows anyone to download and republish, which means our unit of analysis is the census block rolled up to city, county and state — not your specific address.

Provider-reported

Availability data is submitted by the internet providers themselves. It tends to be optimistic: a provider may report a block as served when service is slow to obtain or not available at every address in it. We label these figures as "reported to the FCC by providers", and they are best read as an upper bound.

How it's processed

The FCC files describe millions of census blocks. We aggregate them to places and counties at build time — computing, for each area, which providers appear, the share of the area covered by each technology, and the share of homes with at least one fiber option.

How current it is

The FCC updates the BDC roughly twice a year. Each area page shows the collection period the figures are drawn from.