National Broadband Map Archive

Welcome to the VT National Broadband Map Archive

The Virginia Tech National Broadband Map Archive preserves historical data from the FCC's US National Broadband Map to support reproducible research and open-access broadband data tooling.

This demonstration site is currently under construction.

Understanding the Data

The FCC releases major updates to the map every six months; we refer to these as major updates. Minor updates to each major update (reflecting challenges and other changes) occur typically every two weeks for several months after a major version is initially released.

The FCC provides bulk data for each major/minor release pair broken down by state and technology type. We monitor the FCC for new releases on a daily basis. Every time a new release appears, we archive it, perform basic data cleaning and sanitization to standardize formats and produce a single, nationwide parquet file representing an entire release. Typically, a map release will appear here 1-2 days after the FCC releases it.

The data files are organized by release date, in the format nbm_YYYYMMDD_YYYYMMDD_zstd.parquet. The first date is the major release date, and the second is the minor release date.

Getting Started

You can browse data directly from the /data/ directory, or use the CLI tools described below.

Example Usage

(this script is coming soon!)

./nbm_fetch.py \ 
  --states VA,NC \
  --technologies 10,40 \
  --releases 20240630_20250415 \
  --output-dir ./output

Use --list-releases to see what's available.

Querying with DuckDB

You can use DuckDB to query the data directly from the archive. For example, to get the number of unique ISPs in Virginia from the June 2024 map release (specifically the version updated on January 21, 2025), run:

duckdb -c "SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT provider_id) AS unique_providers 
FROM 'https://broadband.cs.vt.edu/data/nbm_20240630_20250121_zstd.parquet' 
WHERE state_usps = 'VA';"

Reproducible Research

We are committed to reproducible research and open access broadband data. To support this, we provide a manifest file for each update to the Archive containing file size, creation times, and checksums for all releases of the map we store.

We additionally provide historical manifests to provide transparency on the history of the archive as well as provenance files for all data files included in the archive in our metadata. Provenance files record which underlying files from the FCC were used to generate each map release.

Data is stored both locally at Virginia Tech and is mirrored to Cloudflare's R2 object storage service.

Publications

The following publications have used the National Broadband Map Archive data. Please contact us if you use data from the archive in your research or work!

Credits and Acknowledgements

The Virginia Tech National Broadband Map Archive is a project of the SPIN@VT Lab. Syed Tauhidun Nabi collected the original dataset. Zhuowei Wen contributed to crawling infrastructure for the project. Shaddi Hasan developed crawling and archiving infrastructure.

We thank members of Broadband Commons for many useful conversations regarding accessing and archiving the broadband map, particularly Robert Martin and Nick Pappin.

If you find this work useful, please cite it as:

@misc{nbmarchive,
    author = {Hasan, Shaddi and Nabi, Syed Tauhidun and Wen, Zhuowei},
    title = {The National Broadband Map Archive},
    url = {https://broadband.cs.vt.edu},
    year = {2025},
}

Contact

Shaddi Hasan (shaddi@vt.edu)