With the availability of federal and state funding, states such as Massachusetts have a financial opportunity to ensure that every broadband serviceable location (BSL) across the state has access to at least one high speed internet connection. Though great progress has been made, there are still a few remaining pockets of unserved and underserved locations across the commonwealth.
The Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) is administering federal broadband infrastructure funds allocated to Massachusetts through the American Rescue Plan Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. MBI saw a need to develop more accurate statewide BSL data to support its objective of deploying federal funds to achieve universal access to high-speed internet service. The licensing requirements, data sharing and distribution constraints, and low data accuracy of existing address level BSL data prevented MBI from leveraging third-party data.
To get a complete view of the broadband landscape in Massachusetts, Sanborn collaborated with MBI to create a state-owned BSL layer using publicly available 911 and parcel data using Safe Software's FME and Esri ArcPro QA/QC tools. The resulting data allows MBI to more accurately target federal funds for the state of Massachusetts to achieve viable broadband mass market service availability to every residential and business address in the state.
