After the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) started drafting new guidance on creating a broadband coverage map back in 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia decided to get ahead of the game and create a map of its own.
That’s according to Brandon Herndon, director of the Center for Geospatial Information Technology (CGIT) at Virginia Tech, which was involved in the state map’s creation. However, unlike the FCC’s map, which broadly reports coverage at a census block level, Virginia’s map reports at an address level. This was made possible after Virginia’s 2022 Budget Bill directed all broadband service providers to submit updated service territory data to the Department of Housing and Community Development’s (DHCD) Office of Broadband.
CGIT and the department then worked together to create and launch a mapping tool, Commonwealth Connection, in March 2022 showing broadband coverage in Virginia. The FCC released its first map in November 2022.
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