Conference Agenda

This tutorial introduces researchers and practitioners—including policymakers from state broadband offices, public utility commissions, and municipal broadband programs—to practical tools for measuring broadband availability, affordability, and adoption.

Policymakers require accurate, fine-grained data on broadband access, pricing, and consumer adoption. Existing datasets—which typically rely on ISPs’ self-reported claims—often overstate coverage or are insufficiently granular. Policymakers cannot reliably use this data to assess infrastructure investments, ISP competition, affordability initiatives, or adoption trends.

We introduce three tools to address these challenges, empowering policymakers to collect and analyze broadband plans at the address level across multiple ISPs, thus enabling an empirically grounded approach to designing and evaluating broadband policy.

Robust and Extensible Measurement of Broadband Plans with BQT+ (60 minutes)

We first introduce the Broadband-Plan Querying Tool (BQT+), which collects address-level broadband plan information—including upload and download speed, price, and adoption—directly from ISPs’ websites. To date, BQT+ supports 100+ ISPs, with additional providers continually being added, and has collected data for 250,000+ residential addresses across the U.S. This data has been supplied to state and local agencies, such as Virginia’s Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS), Pew Charitable Trusts, and the California Public Utilities Commission, and has informed broadband policy reports. We explain how BQT+ works and how its granular data can help develop and evaluate broadband policy. Participants will see examples of BQT+ data and a short demonstration of the system.

Platformized Broadband Market Auditing with BQT-SaaS (60 minutes)

Second, we present BQT-SaaS, a platformized version of BQT+ designed for policymakers. BQT-SaaS allows public agencies to put BQT+ to their own use, to audit broadband availability, evaluate pricing, and measure adoption—without technical expertise. We demonstrate how agencies can select ISPs of interest, upload address lists, and receive structured datasets explaining which providers serve what addresses, along with detailed plan and pricing information. By eliminating the need for technical expertise, BQT-SaaS helps government agencies monitor broadband markets, validate ISPs’ service claims, and build an empirical foundation for policy.

The Broadband Affordability Dashboard (60 minutes)

Lastly, we introduce the Broadband Affordability Dashboard, a tool that translates broadband data, such as that collected by BQT-SaaS, into affordability policy. Specifically, the Broadband Affordability Dashboard helps policymakers optimize the trade-offs between their affordability goals, subsidy budgets, and rate caps: Policymakers can specify a subsidy budget and compute the rate cap required to achieve a specific affordability target; or alternatively, fix an affordability threshold and determine the subsidy needed to ensure affordability with no price controls. Using Virginia as an example, we demonstrate how policymakers can identify affordability gaps and evaluate competing policy interventions.

In sum, attendees will learn to collect address-level broadband data and translate that data into evidence-based broadband policy—from infrastructure programs to affordability initiatives. Such matters are highly relevant to a wide swath of the TPRC community, including scholars, policymakers, consumer and public-interest advocacy groups, as well as industry experts. Ultimately, this session equips participants with the data-gathering capacity and analytical frameworks necessary to implement an actionable, evidence-based broadband policy.