Hannah-Graber-Portfolio
Final Project, Stage 1
Outlining
Across the United States, urban, rural, and suburban communities alike lack access to high-speed internet, otherwise known as broadband. Broadband is defined as internet speed that meets the minimum requirement of 25 Megabits per second download speed and 3 Megabits per second upload speed. With many aspects of society (e.g., education, healthcare, and the workforce) moving online, access to fast and reliable internet is becoming more important for the sake of social and economic mobility.
Many internet providers don’t offer broadband-level speeds to their constituencies—especially in rural areas, furthering the digital divide between those who have access to online spaces and those that do not. Governments and regulatory bodies seek to address this divide by creating policies that make broadband more affordable and available to all types of communities. However, there is very little data available to the public sector that would help entities pinpoint which communities lack access (and the nature of the inaccess), especially in Pennsylvania where the speed definitions for broadband are so slow, the maps insinuate that nearly everyone has access.
In response, an organization called Ookla crowdsources speed test data from their app users globally. Users allow the app to access their location and then run a speed test to determine upload and download speed for a given area; that data is then aggregated by Ookla to create a comprehensive map and database of speed coverage. Ookla For Good makes speed test data available to “policy makers, humanitarian organizations, academic research institutions, journalists, network operators, and consumers” for free to help bridge the digital divide. My hope in presenting this information is that my audience will feel compelled to reach out to the PA Governor and implore them to increase the state definition of broadband, and download the app and conduct their own speed tests to strengthen the data.
Project Story Structure and Sketches
The Data
The data sourcing for this project is tricky because the project centers around the lack of available data. That said, there are a couple primary sources of data that I will be using to help tell the story of why broadband is important and how representation of speeds can impact communities.
Firstly, I’m partially collecting my own data for the project by using Ookla’s Speedtest app to determine the upload and download speeds of the internet in different areas around Pittsburgh to show the audience how speeds can differ between areas. Similarly, the University of Wisconsin published a report that outlines the speeds necessary to perform everyday tasks.
Secondly, the American Community Survey through the Census Bureau publishes data each year about the types of internet and computers households in a area, and I will use this publicly available data to perform summary statistics and perhaps some maps outlining the state of internet access in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
Finally, Ookla has made available the crowdsourced speed data they collect from their app. I intend to use the shapefiles they’ve uploaded to their Github site to create maps of the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area to show my audience the TRUE state of broadband access/speeds compared to the federally available speed data (which overestimates access due to Pennsylvania’s low speed definition of broadband).
- Ookla Speedtesting
- Broadband and the Wisconsin Economy
- Opensource Ookla Speedtest Data
- ACS 1-year 2021 Internet and Broadband Access Data (B28011)
Method and Medium
I plan on displaying my final project in Shorthand, a web-based visual media platform that will help me easily present my data visualizations. For the actual visualizations, I plan to use Tableau and/or Flourish along with ArcGIS Pro and then import the iframe codes into Shorthand for presentation.