Back at the FCC: Maps and Meetups

I haven’t visited the FCC’s website in recent months. At least since the FCC’s Heimlich maneuver that forced AT&T to cough-up T-Mobile. While some in Congress think otherwise, there’s more to the FCC than its evil plans on our communications infrastructure. For example, there is a relatively new developer friendly Tools section on their site.

Hold on to your our bonnets, but the FCC has even published a series of web service APIs to let the public access their hidden data banks. Much of the information that can be retrieved is based around the competitive data the FCC routinely collects from carriers and ISPs.

But they’ve also made their broadband speed results obtained by an FCC experiment in crowdsourced consumer-based testing accessible to the coding public.

Anyway, the FCC mapping data can be linked to census block identifiers and other geographical categorizations ( congressional districts, etc.). This means motivated developers can create some useful interactive maps as they overlay FCC data with other demographic information.

To give developers a few ideas, the FCC has set up sample apps based on their APIs. Nothing too controversial here, but one of the maps on USF funding is worth taking a look at. It shows the net flow of Universal Service Fund dollars per voice line. For example, Texas, which in some people’s mind is SXSW and a few high-tech corridors, is a net receiver of USF revenue for covering some of those underpopulated stretches in the Lone Star state (see below).

In my own quick hacks–shout out to Kodingen, which is my coding notepad–with the FCC APIs, I learned that there are 28 broadband providers in my home state of NJ. And that Comcast, my service provider, offers wired download speeds above 25 Mbps to almost half of its subscribers. Not a great number to boast about, but that’s what the data tells me.

Gov 2.0 developers in the Washington, DC area can also attend .Gov meetups, where FCC and other government APIs are explored. In fact, there’s one being held today at the FCC’s headquarters.

Today’s meetup is being videotaped and presumably archived, so non-Washingtonians and occasional bloggers also can learn a few things about Gov 2.0 projects. I’ll take a peak at the video after it gets posted, and let you know what I learn.