Broadband Data Sources
The sources we go back to, ordered the way an operator or an investor needs them. Every entry was opened and checked, and says what the source is good for and where it stops.
There is no shortage of broadband data. There is a shortage of knowing which source answers which question, and which ones are still being maintained. This is the short list we keep coming back to, written for people running or investing in networks. Groups are ordered the way an operator or an investor tends to need them, and each one opens with the question it answers.
37 sources survived the cut. Each entry says what the source actually publishes, how current it is, and where it stops being the right tool.
How we picked these
Authority. Primary data owners and regulators first: the FCC, NTIA, the Census Bureau, Ofcom, the OECD, the ITU. Then established research organizations and associations. A source that republishes someone else’s numbers is listed as a republisher, not as the source.
Currency. Every entry was opened and its latest release checked. Anything discontinued came out, which is why 2 well-known measured-speed programs are missing: the FCC’s Measuring Broadband America ended after the August 2024 report, and Australia’s Measuring Broadband Australia ended when its funding lapsed in 2026. Neither has a successor.
Presentation. Interactive tools and downloadable data rank above a PDF, and anything behind a form or a paywall says so in its entry.
Two rules did most of the cutting. We left out vendor forecasts and opinion pieces where the company selling the product also profits if the prediction comes true; a five-year growth projection from a company selling the equipment is marketing, whatever the chart looks like. We kept commercial measurement where the data itself is the product and the method is published, and labeled it commercial so you can weigh it yourself. Ookla, Opensignal, Cloudflare and OpenVault are all on this list for that reason.
One habit worth adopting: check what a number is measuring before comparing it to another number. Availability data is provider-reported and says nothing about installation. Speed tests are user-initiated and carry the device and the Wi-Fi with them. Survey data measures what people say about their own service. Three sources can disagree about the same household and all three can be right.
Market and operator financials
What is the business behind the network? Operator benchmarks, subscriber and revenue estimates, and the only recurring source here for how much data households actually use.
Point Topic
Quarterly global broadband subscriber counts by technology and region, with map-based fiber coverage analysis for the UK and Europe. Summary figures are free and the detailed data is paid. Strongest outside the US, where it is one of the few consistent long-running series.
Parks Associates
Consumer research on US and Canadian households covering broadband, smart home and connected entertainment. The quarterly Broadband Market Tracker with subscriber and revenue estimates for 25-plus providers is a paid product, but the press releases and analyst blog carry the headline findings for free.
OpenVault's OVBI usage report
The quarterly usage picture: average and median consumption per subscriber, upstream growth and the share of power users, measured across millions of subscriber lines. It is the only recurring source on this list for how much data households actually use, as opposed to what they can buy. The full report requires registration.
World Broadband Association
Operator-led association publishing global fiber and broadband reports, including work measuring actual fiber penetration against its earlier projections. Reports are free behind a registration form. Membership is operators and vendors, so read it as an industry consensus view rather than an independent one.
Telecommunications Benchmarking Study
Annual operating and financial benchmarks for more than 200 US broadband and telecom operators: revenue, margins, subscriber growth, capital intensity and fiber penetration. The 2026 edition runs to roughly 15,000 words and 21 charts, free with no form. The single best free yardstick for an operator asking how it compares.
Rural Broadband Benchmark Study
The rural counterpart: financial and operating data from 157 rural telecom companies. Use it alongside the Baker Tilly study when the comparison set matters, since rural operators carry very different cost and subsidy structures.
BEAD funding and policy
Where is the BEAD money going, and what changed this week? The assembled final-proposal data, and the daily policy digest that tracks what moves around it.
BEAD Final Proposal Data
The most complete public assembly of BEAD final proposal data: subgrantee, project, location, excluded-location and community anchor files as Parquet and zipped CSV, current to late August 2026. ACLP's own analyses cover what is left unfunded after awards, the ratio of awards to existing footprint, and permitting burden. Note that the location files key to CostQuest Fabric IDs, which are licensed.
Benton Institute for Broadband and Society
A free daily digest of broadband policy news, published every weekday with no signup, plus non-partisan policy research. The fastest way to know that a BEAD rule changed, a court ruled, or a state program moved, without watching a dozen sources yourself.
Broadband availability and mapping
Who has service, and where? Nearly every answer here traces back to the same provider- reported federal data, which is why they disagree at the edges.
FCC National Broadband Map
The legal baseline. Location-level fixed and mobile availability reported by providers through the Broadband Data Collection, with a national summary per release and bulk downloads. Major releases land about twice a year with rolling revisions in between. Everything is provider-reported, so it is a record of what carriers claim they can serve, not what is installed.
NTIA Data Explorer
Interactive maps, charts, tables and fact sheets on internet use and adoption, with CSV export. Check the vintage before citing it: the newest dataset is the November 2023 Internet Use Survey, a biennial supplement to the Current Population Survey. The Research Center publishes the raw datasets, sample code and weighting methodology.
Data Central Research Center · Project LEIA county-level adoption estimates
Connected Nation BEAD Tracker
A national dashboard built from the final proposal data each state files with NTIA: locations, funding, technology and provider allocations, with a state comparison view. As of September 2026 it reported $19.94B in BEAD deployment spend across 3,949,186 locations, an average state cost of $5,786 per location, and $21.66B unspent. The page carries no update date, and the figures move as NTIA works through curing.
CostQuest Associates
The company behind the Location Fabric that the FCC map and BEAD are built on. Its Broadband in America analysis and time-series dashboard of BDC releases by state, county, provider and technology are free to read; the underlying data is licensed, which is worth knowing before you plan work around it.
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
The only maintained national map of municipal, cooperative and tribal networks, updated as each network is verified. Use it for the question no federal dataset answers directly: who owns the network, rather than what speed it sells. The organization advocates for public ownership, which shows in the accompanying writing more than in the map.
Cartesian State of US Broadband
A twice-yearly read of fixed coverage, construction and competition by technology and speed tier, built on the FCC data, published each June and December with free HTML data tables. Cartesian also produces the annual fiber deployment cost report with the Fiber Broadband Association, an operator survey covering underground versus aerial build costs, permitting and make-ready.
June 2026 data tables · Fiber Deployment Cost Annual Report 2025
Adoption, affordability and pricing
What do people pay, and who actually signs up? Federal adoption series, survey data and collected plan pricing.
American Community Survey
Table S2801 is the authoritative source for household subscription and computer ownership by geography, down to small areas in the 5-year estimates. One caveat governs every use of it: the ACS category broadband of any type includes cellular data plans, so for wireline adoption you want the cable, fiber or DSL line instead.
Pew Research Center
The internet and broadband fact sheet carries adoption by demographic group back to 2000, with interactive tabs and a CSV behind every chart. Survey-based, so it measures what people report about their own service, which is the right instrument for the adoption question and the wrong one for speed.
BroadbandNow Research
Consumer-facing research on what households actually pay, combining survey work with plan pricing collected from more than 2,100 ISPs, plus long-run price trends by technology. The company is a commercial comparison site, so treat the pricing collection as the product it is and check the method note on each study.
Purdue Center for Regional Development
The Digital Divide Index scores counties on infrastructure and socioeconomic factors together, published as an interactive story map. Useful when you need one defensible composite measure of need rather than a stack of separate indicators.
USTelecom Broadband Pricing Index
An annual index of US residential broadband prices built from the FCC Urban Rate Survey, covering the 14 largest wireline providers. USTelecom is the providers' trade association, so the framing favors the industry; the underlying survey is federal data and can be checked independently.
Speed and performance
How fast is service really? Advertised speed and delivered speed are different numbers, and these 3 measure the second one differently enough that they do not agree.
Ookla
The largest body of consumer speed measurement there is: the monthly Speedtest Global Index ranks countries on fixed and mobile speed, and the research articles go deeper. Tests are user-initiated, so results carry the device and the home Wi-Fi along with the access network. The open data tiles are free but licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which means non-commercial use only.
Opensignal
Crowdsourced experience benchmarks, free to read with no login. The most recent US fixed broadband report is May 2026, covering January through March 2026, with a companion view broken out by metro area. Like all crowdsourced measurement it reflects the whole path including device and Wi-Fi, which makes it a good proxy for what customers perceive and a poor one for access network capacity.
M-Lab
The open raw alternative: every NDT test ever run, published as a public dataset rather than a report. Working with it means SQL and BigQuery, and the NDT test measures a single TCP stream, so its numbers read lower than Speedtest's multi-stream results. That is a methodology difference, not an error, and it matters when the two get compared.
Outages and internet health
Is the network down right now? Live outage data from 4 different vantage points, plus 2 views of the structural health underneath it.
Cloudflare Radar
Traffic, attack, outage and connection quality data by country and network, drawn from one of the largest networks on the internet. The outage center is the live view; quarterly disruption summaries and an annual year in review give the written analysis. The vantage point is Cloudflare's own traffic, which is broad but not neutral coverage of every network.
Downdetector
Real-time outage reports for ISPs and online services, submitted by customers. It is the fastest signal that something is wrong and the weakest evidence of what: the data is people reporting, not network telemetry, and a spike can reflect a service riding on the network rather than the network itself.
ThousandEyes Internet Outages Map
A live outage map built from active network monitoring rather than user reports, alongside trend charts for global connectivity, ISPs, public cloud and collaboration apps. Free with no login. The post-incident analyses are event-driven rather than scheduled, and recent ones are dated and specific.
Kentik Cloud Latency Map
Live latency between cloud provider regions, covering AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, IBM and OCI by city and region with time series. Narrow by design, and the only free public source for cloud-to-cloud performance.
RIPE Atlas
A global measurement network of physical probes, with traffic and latency maps, streaming data and a full API. This is the network operations view: latency, routing and reachability rather than consumer speed, run by a regional internet registry.
Internet Society Pulse
Country-level internet health from a neutral nonprofit: shutdowns, market concentration, resilience scores that include the US, and adoption of IPv6, HTTPS and DNSSEC. The good complement to Cloudflare Radar, since it measures the structural health of a country's internet rather than live traffic.
International benchmarks
How does the US compare? Regulators and multilaterals that publish the same measures for other countries, which is what makes comparison possible at all.
Ofcom Connected Nations
The UK regulator's twice-yearly report on fixed availability and mobile coverage, with an interactive version and full data downloads. The closest international equivalent to the FCC's availability reporting, and a useful model for what a regulator can publish when the data collection is mandatory.
OECD Broadband Portal
Fixed and mobile subscriptions, penetration per 100 inhabitants and technology shares for all 38 member countries, collected from national regulators, which makes it the cleanest like-for-like country comparison available. Series lag by design, so state the vintage of every figure you quote from it.
ITU DataHub
Global indicators on internet use, fixed and mobile subscriptions and price baskets by country, plus the annual Facts and Figures report. The separate infrastructure map is the hidden gem: terrestrial fiber and microwave by status, submarine cables, distance-to-node rings and a fiber cost calculator. Anonymous users are capped at region-level zoom.
Canadian Telecommunications Market Report
The cross-border comparison point, and the pricing detail is the reason to read it: prices tracked at 3 defined speed tiers, affordability by income quintile, plus coverage, ARPU, churn and margins. Free in HTML with a data table under every figure. Commission survey data runs a year behind; the third-party inputs are more current.
Digital Decade DESI dashboard
Member-state indicators for connectivity, digital skills, business digitalization and public services, maintained as a live dashboard with the annual State of the Digital Decade report as the written companion.
FTTH Market Panorama
The annual European fiber benchmark, produced with IDATE: country-level coverage and take-up, plus an annual tracker of copper switch-off progress, which is the question US operators increasingly face. Trade association, free behind a signup form.
Global infrastructure and curated lists
The backbone underneath all of it, a clean chart layer over the global indicators, and where to look when a question falls outside this list.
TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map
The reference map of the world's submarine cable systems and landing stations, with a companion map of cloud regions, zones and on-ramps. Free to use with no signup, from a research firm whose underlying datasets are paid. Backbone and subsea, not last mile.
Our World in Data
A clean chart and CSV layer over World Bank and ITU indicators, with the source named on every chart. A republisher rather than a primary source, which is exactly what makes it useful for a quick, citable country comparison chart.
awesome-connectivity-info
A long-running curated list of connectivity data sources, maps and research, maintained on GitHub. The emphasis is global and development-focused rather than US, so treat it as the place to look when a question falls outside this list.
Looking for a specific state?
State and territory broadband and BEAD maps are indexed separately, one entry per jurisdiction, with what each map shows.
State broadband and BEAD maps