The Fiber Strategy Toolkit is an essential strategic resource for anyone building fiber infrastructure. It includes nationwide data from the FCC Fabric v4 May/June 2024 release (coverage as of 12-31-2023).
The Fiber Strategy Toolkit Pro includes an additional layer of road distance data and a suite of capabilities for estimating fiber deployment costs based on road distances. This capability is a subset of the capabilities of the Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit (Midwest, Northeast, South, or West | Map, Pre-Engineering Introduction). The Fiber Strategy Toolkit Pro, unlike the Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit, does not include actual road segments, but has an integrated user interface with all the functionality at the hexagon level of the two toolkits.
The Fiber Strategy Toolkit exploits the FCC's new hexagonal (H3) framework. It includes a long list of fiber-related data sets, showing both presence (the existence of the specified service) and depth (the percentage of locations in each hexagon served at the specified level). Key dimensions include:
- Residential at multiple speeds
- Residential vs. Business
- Speed of 1000 Mbps/1000 Mbps, 100Mbps/20Mbps, 25Mbps/3Mbps, and any performance.
The Toolkit identifies opportunities to build, including areas that are populated but currently have no residential fiber. It visualizes this information by highlighting level 8 hexagons based on location densities of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, and 500 locations per level 8 hexagon. Higher densities in general represent compelling business cases. Lower densities are more likely to require some form of subsidy (e.g. BEAD or CPF).
The Toolkit includes exhaustive competitive information:
- 1,496 fiber ISPs (holding companies).
- Reported on a location-by-location basis (visualized by level 8 hex).
- Exhaustive set of data (location ID, uplink and downlink speeds, low latency or not, business vs. residential (B, R, X), brand name, FRN, and holding company ID).
- Details visible by clicking on a hexagon.
- Filtered by competitor (preconfigured to show each of the top 10 holding companies, “all”, and a customized filter).
- The speed of growth is seen by comparing the two time periods.
- Approximately 50 million ISP-location records.
- A geographic area can be selected via the visual tool and exported into a spreadsheet (with location-level detail) for further analysis.
The Toolkit includes essential planning data on a hexagon level, based on the Fabric v3 framework:
- Populated areas by level 8 hexagon
- Unpopulated areas
- Locations and units (a.k.a. homes passed) per level 8 hexagon
- Roads, state and county boundaries, cities and town names, community anchor institutions, tribal lands, 911/PSAP boundaries, a selection of streamed base maps, and many other important references.
The FCC recently released a Broadband Funding Map. The Toolkit incorporates this new FCC data, showing fundable unserved and underserved locations per level 8 hexagon. The Toolkit also shows maps of nine federal programs, each representing excluded areas:
- FCC: RDOF, CAF II, Bringing Puerto Rico Together, Connect USVI
- NTIA: Broadband Infrastructure Program, Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program
- Rural Utilities Service: Community Connect Program, Rural eConnectivity Program, Telephone Loan Program
- Treasury: Capital Projects Fund
This single tool allows the user to explore all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia. The hexagonal grid enables exceptionally high resolution in rural areas (example).
The user may wish to purchase the National Hex Toolkit as well. It shows the presence of all four BEAD technologies (fiber, cable, DSL/copper, and licensed FWA) at various performance levels.
Take a few minutes to read the Strategy Introduction, the Pre-Engineering Introduction, the Getting Started Guide and the site License Agreement. You'll appreciate the breadth of what the Toolkit can do.
Some of the secondary data sets are available only for the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, but not for Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Location-level data is shown by hexagon and tagged to the location ID. It does not include an exact longitude / latitude because these details have not been released to the public by the FCC without a restrictive third-party license.
Important: GIS software is demanding. This software requires a relatively new fully-configured computer (RAM, processor speed, SSD, etc.) to fully leverage its capabilities.
This product is delivered via a digital download.
