The Constantly Moving Maps of Virginia Broadband 

The Constantly Moving Maps of Virginia Broadband
by Doug Mohney 

Virginia has made significant progress in providing high-speed connectivity to all its households and businesses over the past decade and anticipates using $1.43 billion in BEAD funding to reach 100% connectivity to all addresses in the next few years. Progress and ultimate success in connecting the citizens of the Commonwealth has been due in part to a committed approach building and constantly updating a comprehensive statewide broadband map detailed down to every address.  

“Our success under BEAD is going to hinge on how good or bad the maps are that we’re running these broadband deployment initiatives on, and that’s something we’ve been doing in Virginia for several years now,” said Chandler Vaughn, Associate Director, Virginia Office of Broadband, on this week’s Fiber for Breakfast. “We’ve already got nearly 300,000 homes and businesses in Virginia wrapped up in existing broadband deployment projects, much of them fiber to the home that are actively building out across Virginia. BEAD is going to get us across the finish line. Preliminarily, our BEAD-eligible list of locations is around 133,000 homes and businesses in Virginia.” 

The state’s hard work in developing its own detailed maps through a partnership with Virginia Tech’s Center for Geospatial Information Technology has paid off in securing an extra $250 million in BEAD funding for 60,000 locations through the FCC broadband map challenge process. Vaughn and Brandon Herndon, Director, Center for Geospatial Information Technology, Virginia Tech, emphasized that mapping is not a static process, but one that needs constant care.  

“We work hand in hand with Chandler, usually on a daily basis, replying to their needs and analyzing data,” said Herndon. “When you have millions of addresses and points to figure out, it takes processing, database manipulation and code writing to glean data you need from those sources. It’s been an interesting journey and looking forward to working with them in the future to continue.”  

Virginia Tech became involved with the broadband mapping process around 2011, initially assisting legislators in identifying where the needs were around the Commonwealth. Early maps were based on FCC census block data and didn’t provide granular data on the actual number of homes served within an area. Worse, all the addresses within an entire census block could be considered as served just by a broadband provider asserting it could deliver service to a single address within the block within a reasonable amount of time.  

“In 2021, we did the first state collection of address level data,” said Herndon. “Over [those] 10 years, we went from block level to location level data prior to the BEAD [program] being announced. We were able to challenge over 60,000 locations that weren’t included in the initial FCC map. So that was a big win for us; got us a lot of extra funding for Virginia.” 

Map refinements Virginia Tech has incorporated include being able to provide more detail as to individual units served by broadband in multi-family dwellings, such as in apartment complexes and managing a decertification process for addresses that don’t necessarily need high-speed broadband.  

“In some cases, there’s a lot of barns and rocks and salt sheds and duck blinds” included on the maps that need to be removed, noted Vaughn, while new home construction with or without internet need to be added into the overall data.  

For more information on the power of mapping and how broadband maps need to change over time, listen to the latest episodes of Fiber for Breakfast.