Building National Spatial Data Infrastructures

National Broadband Map Data Quality Assessment – Nationwide Data Processing Challenges

—Michael Byrne, FCC

The FCC broadband mapping mission supports the process through the quality assessment of the State Broadband Data Development (SBDD) data submissions, SBDD process improvement recommendations, and confidence scoring for broadband coverage reporting.

The broadband data submitted by the States and Territories is compared against other federal and commercial sources of broadband information for consistency. Faced with very tight schedules, and large volumes of data (upwards of 20 million records from FCC and 600 million records of reference data) to run through the comparison process, Baker took drastic steps away from the server centric enterprise for their solution. While source data are maintained in enterprise RDBMS, for intense geo-processing tasks and attribute queries, both spatial and attribute data are broken down to state level. A desktop-based distributed processing model is adopted. Multiple-instance capable desktop applications are developed to automate the validation and analysis process and can run on the data of individual states.