TPRC 2024: The 52nd Research Conference on Communications, Information and Inter

Link to paper

Abstract:
The FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC) program has had—and will continue to have—tremendous impact on directing policy interventions and funding towards the goal of achieving broadband equity, access, and deployment across the United States.
In this paper, we share our experience analyzing the data disseminated by the FCC as part of this program.
We focus on discussing the challenges and limitations that one may encounter when exploring the datasets made publicly available as part of this program.
Examples are the lack of direct, public data on the fabric layer; the retroactive removal of availability records from past data releases; and the purely file-based data serving model.
We provide recommendations to stakeholders on ways to overcome these challenges and cope with limitations.
These recommendations seek to introduce best practices for processing and analyzing the BDC data.
Where appropriate, we also bring suggestions to the FCC on approaches to eliminate data limitations and lower barriers to analysis.
These suggestions involve changes to how BDC data is published, served, updated, and summarized by the FCC.