How to locate broadband Internet service providers in your area.

The FCC keeps a database of national broadband providers and it is publicly accessible at www.broadbandmap.gov. Just enter your full address or Zip code, and it will the broadband providers in your area as well as the advertised speed. One caveat is the data was last updated on June 2014, thus you might get latest information.

I checked the database for an area which had Google Fiber for the last 9 or 10 months, and it didn’t show Google Fiber as available in that area. The database has Google Fiber Inc. as a provider listed though.

If you want to check if Google Fiber is available or coming soon to your area check https://fiber.google.com/about/.

Once nice thing about the National broadband Map is the open standards API they made available to the public. It is well documented and very easy to pull data from programmatically. The API also gives you access to Census data and demographic information.

Note - most of the queries require the FIPS state and/or county codes (Federal Information Processing Standard state code). For instance, for New York state, the FIPS code is 36. Any county within a state will have FIPS county code of state FIPS code + county FIPS code. Bronx county’s (FIPS 005) full code would be 36005, for instance.

Here is a simple python script on how to interact with the API, will use Bronx county and/or NY as an example.

Let us get the overall broadband ranking within New York state -


import requests
url='https://www.broadbandmap.gov/broadbandmap/almanac/jun2014/rankby/state/36/population/wirelineproviderequals0/county?format=json&order=asc'
r=requests.get(url).json().get('Results').get('All')
for item in r:
    print item.get('rank'), item.get('geographyName')

Output based on ranking would look like this - 1 Franklin 2 Cattaraugus 3 Allegany 4 Schoharie 5 Otsego 6 Lewis 7 Washington 8 Hamilton 9 Yates 10 Delaware 11 Steuben 12 Wyoming 13 Cayuga 14 Jefferson 15 Herkimer 16 Schuyler 17 Essex 18 Seneca 19 St. Lawrence 20 Clinton 21 Montgomery 22 Chautauqua 23 Wayne 24 Columbia 25 Greene 26 Tioga 27 Livingston 28 Tompkins 29 Rensselaer 30 Chemung 31 Genesee 32 Cortland 33 Oswego 34 Sullivan 35 Albany 36 Oneida 37 Chenango 38 Orleans 39 Fulton 40 Madison 41 Niagara 42 Ontario 43 Warren 44 Schenectady 45 Ulster 46 Erie 47 Putnam 48 Onondaga 49 Saratoga 50 Broome 51 Suffolk 52 Monroe 53 Kings 54 Queens 55 New York 56 Bronx 57 Nassau 58 Westchester 59 Richmond 60 Orange 61 Rockland 62 Dutchess

Bronx county is ranked 56 out of 62, and the data for Bronx would be -

for item in r:
    if item.get('geographyId') == '36005':
        print item
        break


{u'anyWireline': 1.0,
 u'anyWirelineError': 0.0,
 u'downloadSpeedGreaterThan3000k': 1.0,
 u'downloadSpeedGreaterThan3000kError': 0.0,
 u'geographyId': u'36005',
 u'geographyName': u'Bronx',
 u'myAreaIndicator': False,
 u'population': 1482311,
 u'providerGreaterThan3': 1.0,
 u'rank': 56,
 u'stateFips': u'36',
 u'wirelineProviderEquals0': 0.0}

There is lots more you can do with the data, feel free to dig further.

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