ISPs have to submit coverage data to the FCC (Form 477) twice a year. This data goes down to the census tract level which is generally far more specific than a ZIP Code.

I'm not sure why they aren't using the more detailed information from http://www.broadbandmap.gov/data-download

Hey, co-founder of Broadbandnow.com here and author of the article.

In our initial development of the site we realized that MOST people don't know what census block they live in, where everyone knows what zip code they live in.

That makes sense, especially for getting started. Have you considered ways to guide people to narrowing down their location?

We store shapefiles (I'm doing GeoJSON in RethinkDB but same difference) for every census tract that we cover with the speed and technology offered (because that's what the FCC requires). Since we have the data we're redoing our service availability mapping so prospective clients can drag the placemark icon on gMaps to their house (because geocoding is horrid in our area and you need to compensate for long driveways) and then show them what's available.

It's interesting when service location is abstracted out. We have a rural residential POP where the immediate neighborhood has fiber, the surrounding mile or two has 10-25Mbps fixed-wireless, and then out to 6 miles has 1M-384k fixed wireless. It's all in the same zip code, and actually, because it's so rural, mostly the same census block. The consumer impact of this: we get people calling us after looking at online broadband maps excited to sign up for fiber and living in the 4 mile range only to get their hopes crushed. Then they realize they can chose between 1Mbps with no cap or 15Mbps LTE with high overages.

I'd love to chat with you about the best way to make this happen on a large scale.

If most providers have shapefiles, is there a common method we could use to collect/manage that data that you'd recommend?

Almost every day (sometimes 5-6 a day) we have smaller providers who email us looking to update their coverage or adding more coverage, but we haven't come up with a manageable way to make it happen.

Then there is the whole validation issue which opens a huge can of worms.

If you're open to chat, I'd be incredibly grateful, we've been trying to tackle this problem for months.

Feel free to drop us a line at help [at] broadbandnow.com

Hey nickreese;

the data is way off. not onlt is basing it on zip not sufficient; but the data is not consistant with actual provider data. I put in my zip; was told I have WAVE as a provider in the area. 'thats news to me' so I go to wave and enter my zip. 'yup; they aren't in my area'

I think you need more accurate data before you can put 39mil in your title! the situation is _much_ worst!

It ought to be possible to map between them, no? I know census blocks are smaller than zip code blocks, but you could provide a choice (or just ask for street address).

The report is actually based on the Census Block data from the NTIA. This is more specific than Zip codes. The broadband search is based on zip for ease of use.

The providers shown on a zip search are providers that reported having at least some coverage in that zip (translated from census blocks). It doesn't mean everyone in the zip has access to all those providers.

So there is a reason for this. The wires (the copper cabling) in your building are owned by hotwire or comcast or whomever made a deal with the building at the time of construction. These wires are a real-estate asset with attached exclusive rights of way over them. For most buildings it is too costly to kick out comcast or build their own internal network. So technically her neighborhood might have multiple providers, each in different buildings.

In some cases the building management is given a wholesale rate for your internet, and then marks it up and uses the revenue to fund association costs, or their own profits.

There's rather little problem to pull some Cat5 or even fiber through a reasonable-size building. Well, NYC buildings are tall, but that's what buys you more customers per yard of cable.

If the building owners had an incentive, or just were not tied by a previous exclusive deal, the technical hurdles would be quite manageable, and more providers would be willing to run their cables and offer their services.

When I lived in Moscow ~6 years ago, my quite moderate house on the outskirts of the city had 2 optical cables run into it, in addition to cheap DSL available over the phone cable, all in hope to serve 60 apartments of people with modest incomes.

I was previously involved in a startup tackling this idea. The pushback in the US market was that the building management is usually super non-technical, afraid of being stuck managing the network themselves, and afraid of the cost. For fiber to be run in a building with 250 units, you're talking around 100-150k in labor, materials, and other costs.

Lately there are two ways I see MDUs providing internet outside of the normal cable/telco ROE arrangement (in my market) that work around that pushback:

1) Low-income housing with a up front grant from .gov for 512kbps or so per tenant. They hire a consultant to deploy wifi and hook it up to random ISP. ISP is paid out of the grant.

2) Mid-range or high-end housing pays a small local provider $10-25 per unit per month to provide X Mbps on a 2-3yr contract.

Both cases remove the up-front cost. The former doesn't care about managing infrastructure and the latter has outsourced it to the ISP.

For us, we try to avoid running new cable/fiber/cat5 because asbestos and cost, but we're working off different assumptions. Your model has cost per unit at $600 and we aim for less than half that otherwise ROI is too far out. Fiber costs basically the same as cat5 but you can frequently reuse copper for 100BaseT if there's a wiring closet per floor which greatly reduces the cost of running cable.

Right now we don't worry about delivering more than 100M because most people we talk to care more about cost than speed once you reliably deliver 15-25Mbps (e.g. not over wifi, no cable/telco peering congestion BS/<10ms to google.com).

I was just talking with some friends about a cloud-managed micro-ISP which would run essentially as a co-op within a condominium. Provide the back-haul and a remote monitored edge device to serve the building LAN, a billing and support portal, financing for the installation cost, etc.

250 units is about $100k in ARR. It sounds like it would easily cover the financing on installation costs with plenty of room to spare for operational cost and even some profit kicked back to the condo association.

I checked your Bio and didn't see any mention, would you mind sharing the name of the startup that was trying this (or something remotely like this)?

Not sure about GP but I have a lot of experience in this area and have tossed around similar ideas myself. If you or anyone reading is interested in this kind of thing I'd love to chat more. Email in my bio.

There's nothing you can really do about this. Even if there were dozens of potential providers, apartment buildings wouldn't want to accommodate dozens of companies running wiring through their building or putting equipment in their telecom closets. And they certainly don't want to take on the cost and hassle of maintaining their own wiring inside the building.

Do building owners maintain their own water plumbing?

The PSTN network is connected to a DMARC at the edge of a building, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_point

How did the phone network work for years with neutral wires within buildings?

>>Even if there were dozens of potential providers, apartment buildings wouldn't want to accommodate dozens of companies running wiring through their building or putting equipment in their telecom closets.

I don't see why this is such a big deal. Where I'm from, different telecom companies come into apartment buildings to set up boxes and run wires and everyone is OK with it.

We rented an office for the new company a few months ago in a building that had just been rehabbed. The building owners had arranged to bring Comcast into the building, but for obvious reasons we wanted to avoid Comcast and called AT&T. AT&T couldn't run cable to the building without significant modifications to the building's wiring. All the conduit intake was installed by Comcast. The "phone closet" was full of Comcast equipment. There is, so far as we know, literally no way to get any service in the building besides Comcast --- unless we owned the building and paid tens of thousands of dollars for new telecom buildout.

Getting a new telecom service into an existing building is, in fact, a big deal.

In our building, a brand-new luxury complex with hundreds of units, the building owner wouldn't even let Verizon run fiber to each unit. They were only allowed to get into a telecom closet on each floor with VDSL the last few hundred feet.

Single-provider building policies will eventually reduce the market value of the real estate, eliminating any minor economic benefit that may accrue in kickbacks from the single provider.

of course there is - UNBUNDLE LAST MILE, its that simple

We had unbundled last mile for quite some time with DSL. Sure we got a ton of new ISPs, but none of them wanted to invest in upgrading the infrastructure.

Right... I know it's hard to figure out an appropriate division, but when this came up a few weeks back, I came up with the following:

For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers: 1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing) 2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.) 3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering) 4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber). So there's one - Olympia, WA.

Even in smaller cities within a single zip-code there can be problems.

Here in San Luis Obispo, Charter cannot run cable to many of the downtown historical buildings–leaving AT&T DSL as the only option. I've turned down some office space because of it.

Yep I'm in the same boat. My apartment complex has its own ISP, whose max available speed is 6mbps with a 150gb cap. Outside of the complex, at least Charter is available, which is 60mbps. The kicker? I pay $46/mo and Charter's offering is $40. Even if it's introductory that's still worth it.

I would actually pay more than I already do to get better internet through my complex, but I literally can't. Bloom Broadband is terrible.

Yeah I've lived in a few larger and mid sized cities and I've never had more than one option. On the east coast its Comcast in some buildings and Time Warner in others (mostly in the North). On the West Coast its all Comcast. Some residential areas I know have access to Century Link but I've never heard of someone in an apartment complex having a choice on their ISP.

98005 lists 5, the building I'm in right now doesn't have any of them; actually called those only to be told that the service is not available. (Only I heard that Comcast 6-digits money to extend their line, I don't know how long it'll take...)

Yep, even in Palo Alto ZIP Code 94301 my apartment only had one option: Comcast. Both ATT U-Verse and Sonic.net were out of range.

In Belmont / 94002, you have a "choice" of comcast or att capped at 6 megabits/s down and 1 megabit/s up. So not really a choice at all.

Can confirm. NYC. Stuck with Time Warner. Or incredibly slow Verizon DSL that has day or week long outtages.