August 21, 2024 by Joe Ross
Televate recently announced our state and county Broadband Reports, and now we’re excited to share that Televate’s Broadband Report are also available for the entire United States! The nationwide report is available here. Televate will provide periodic updates of the nationwide report, so check back to see what’s available from time to time. This nationwide report provides perspective on what is available at the state and county level PDF reports – the content is the same, only the geography over which the data is reported changes for the tables, graphs, charts, and maps.
The report shows the incredible progress made nationwide in broadband service growth. But it also underscores that there is much more work to be done. We would agree that for most households, and for some businesses, 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up is adequate, but for households with remote workers who deal with large data, 20 Mbps is going to affect productivity. So, it’s concerning that fewer than 60 percent of all nationwide locations have service at 100/100 Mbps or higher. As the cable providers, who offer service to the most locations nationwide, start in earnest to upgrade their plant to support upload speeds exceeding 100 Mbps, this number should improve quickly.
When we consider the progression of broadband technology deployments, we can quickly see the source of the improvements. The figure depicts the total serviced locations for each technology over time. Growth in 100/20 Mbps service is likely due to the growth in wireless, and growth at 100/100 Mbps and higher is likely due to the increase in fiber service. The noticeable decline in DSL locations is the result of those providers migrating to fiber service over the two-year period. The dip in wireless locations between June 30, 2022 and December 31, 2022 is surprising. We’re not exactly sure why this exists and would love to hear from people who might know about it. The only thing we could surmise is that the Federal Communications Commission’s correction process amended overreported locations at the end of December 2022, but not in mid-2022.
Finally, we can see the clear trend nationwide regarding the reported reductions in BEAD unserved and underserved locations from the data. Many more locations will be removed from BEAD grant eligibility due to other programs (e.g., RDOF and other grant funded activities), and the internet service providers’ additional in-progress builds. That should further improve the funding levels per location as BEAD funding levels were established on the initial June 2022 service levels. As Televate has previously reported, the locations for cellular fixed wireless access (CFWA) have increased substantially. Only a handful of states elected to consider CFWA locations as underserved. Below is a list of the states that have the largest number of locations with cellular based fixed wireless providers in the August 6, 2024 version of end of 2023 service:
Most of these states did not elect to classify cellular fixed wireless access as underserved. In total, there are just over 700,000 locations that fit this classification – up from around 360,000. It’s possible that these states might regret not funding these locations, especially if other determined reductions in unserved and underserved locations result in the remaining BEAD funds being diverted to other broadband eligible BEAD investments.
You can find the nationwide report here. We’ll update it and post about the new datasets as they are released. Look for a nationwide analysis on competition in the United States in a future update.
Due to the sheer size of the country, there are a few differences you’ll see between the nationwide report and a state/county report. Because of the number of internet service providers (the latest dataset has over 4,000 individual providers), the nationwide Provider Summary includes only the top 25 providers. And, because the territories are spread across the globe and are proportionally much smaller, the territories have been removed from the maps. The state level reports for the territories and their county equivalents are still available for all territories.
Have some thoughts?
We’d love to hear from you. Do you have any recommendations on things you’d like to see in the reports? Would you like to see a blog post on a particular subject? Let us know in the comments section below.