Study of the US Broadband Deployment

Overview

This project investigates the broadband deployment in the US, focusing on identifying cold spots (areas with less than FCC's 25Mbps standard) and their spatial and temporal evolution. For a visual representation, see the below image of LISA clusters from our analysis:

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository to your local machine.
2. Navigate into the repository's parent directory.
3. Create a 'data' directory within the parent directory.
4. Download the dataset from zenodo.
5. Unzip the downloaded files into the 'data' directory.
6. Set up the Python environment by running conda env create -f environment.yml in the terminal. This will install all necessary dependencies.
7. Activate the newly created environment using conda activate us-broadband.
8. Navigate to the 'notebook' directory.
9. Run jupyter notebook to start the Jupyter Notebook and open the data_analysis notebook for analysis.

Objectives

• Spatial Analysis: Mapping areas with low broadband speeds (cold spots) and high broadband speeds (hot spots).
• Temporal Analysis: Examining the changes in broadband coverage over time.

Data Sources

• FCC Broadband Data: Information on ISP reported speeds.
• Census Data: Data on median income, urban population, education level, and broadband demand.

Tools and Technologies

• Python: For data processing and analysis. Dependencies and environment can be set up using a provided conda environment.yml file.