How we turn the FCC broadband map into these figures

The data in one paragraph

Twice a year, every company that sells fixed internet service in the United States must tell the Federal Communications Commission where it offers service, with which technology and at what maximum advertised speeds. The FCC publishes those filings as the National Broadband Map, one record per provider, location and technology, for 115.8 million¹ broadband serviceable locations in the 50 states and DC. We use three releases: the latest, with availability as of June 30, 2026 (FCC file revision of November 10, 2026); the previous one, as of December 31, 2025; and the first, as of June 30, 2022. Each release is revised every few weeks after challenges and corrections, so we always use the newest revision of each and say which one on every page.

What a "location" is

The FCC counts broadband serviceable locations: every building or structure where fixed broadband is, or could be, installed. A house is one location, and so is an apartment building or a small business. Locations are not households and not people: an apartment block of two hundred units counts once. That is why every share on this site reads "of locations" or "of homes and businesses", never "of households".

The list of locations, the Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric, is maintained by an FCC contractor and is licensed: the public files identify each location only by an ID, its 2020 census block and its hexagon cell, not by address or coordinates. We therefore publish areas, never addresses. To see what is reported at one address, use the FCC's own map at broadbandmap.fcc.gov.

The Fabric is updated with every release, adding new construction and correcting old entries; the national count changed by +581,049¹ locations between December 31, 2025 and June 30, 2026. Because the universe moves, we compare shares between releases, not counts.

How the files become state, county and city figures

1. Download. We list each release through the FCC Public Data API and download every state-by-technology availability file: 115.8 million¹ locations and several hundred million provider records per release. Each file's name carries its revision date, which we record with its size and checksum.
2. Residential service only. Each record says whether the offer is for residential customers, business customers only, or both. A business-only offer is not something a household can order, so records filed for business customers only are left out of every availability, speed, choice and provider figure on this site. One documented exception: from the June 2026 release, Metronet files its network as business service only, because it became a wholesale network whose residential customers, according to T-Mobile's annual report to the SEC, are now T-Mobile's; T-Mobile does not file those homes, so we count Metronet's listings as residential. This follows the residential view of the FCC's own map; the FCC's published totals and its served and unserved files count every record, and our checks below compare like with like.
3. One row per location. For every location we combine its records into a set of flags: which technologies are reported, whether any terrestrial offer reaches 25/3, 100/20, 100/100 or 1,000/100 Mbps, how many different providers offer 100/20 Mbps over a wire, and what the fastest advertised terrestrial download is.
4. Geography. Each location sits in a 2020 census block. Blocks nest in counties and in cities and towns, so we assign every location through the Census Bureau's 2020 block assignment files. Connecticut's locations are mapped from its old counties to the nine planning regions the Census Bureau now uses, through the towns that make them up. City figures therefore cover the city limits as drawn for the 2020 Census.
5. Aggregation. We count flagged locations in every state, county and city, and divide by all locations there.
6. Providers. The FCC lists filers by provider ID and holding company. We group filers under the brand people know (for example, Charter Communications as Spectrum and Comcast as Xfinity) and count where each brand reports service. Resellers do not file with the FCC, so they never appear.

Definitions

• Fiber, cable, DSL: the FCC technology codes for fiber to the premises (50), cable or hybrid fiber-coaxial (40) and copper wire (10). A cable network with fiber in its backbone is still cable.
• Licensed fixed wireless, including 5G home internet: codes 71 and 72. T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T report their 5G and LTE home internet here, as do many regional wireless companies using licensed spectrum. Unlicensed fixed wireless (code 70) is mostly local wireless internet providers.
• Satellite: codes 60 (geostationary) and 61 (low-Earth-orbit, such as Starlink). Satellite providers report service at nearly every location in the country, so satellite is left out of every "can get broadband" headline on this site; we show where it is the only option instead.
• 100/20 Mbps: an offer of at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload, the FCC's current benchmark for fixed broadband. Wired counts fiber, cable and DSL; terrestrial adds fixed wireless.
• Gigabit: at least 1,000 Mbps download and 100 Mbps upload, the top tier in the FCC's summary tables. Many cable gigabit plans have slower uploads; we also show "1 Gbps download" at any upload speed, and say which one a figure uses.
• Competition: the number of different providers offering wired service of 100/20 Mbps or more at the same location. Two providers under one owner can file separately, so "providers" means FCC provider IDs.
• Served, underserved, unserved: the definitions of NTIA's Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. A location is served if it has reliable service of 100/20 Mbps, meaning fiber, cable, DSL or licensed fixed wireless reported with low latency; underserved if its best reliable service is at least 25/3 but below 100/20; unserved otherwise, including locations with only satellite or unlicensed fixed wireless. These three categories keep every record, business-only offers included, so that they match the FCC's served and unserved files that states used for BEAD.

How we check the processing

Before any figure goes on the site, our tests compare our results with numbers the FCC publishes itself. Because the FCC's totals include business-only offers, these checks use our all-records counts; the residential figures on the rest of the site are slightly lower, and in a few places, such as cities where a business-only fiber network is filed, much lower. The table below is generated by those tests each time the data are rebuilt.

The FCC also publishes summary tables weighted by housing units rather than locations; we use them only as a cross-check, because a unit-weighted share and a location-weighted share are different measures of the same reality.

Census subscription figures

Availability says what providers offer; it does not say what households buy. For that we use the Census Bureau's American Community Survey: the 2025 one-year estimates for states and for cities of 65,000 or more, and the 2020–2024 five-year estimates for counties. These are survey estimates, shown with their 90% margin of error. Respondents describe their own service, and the survey cannot separate fiber from cable or DSL. Availability (locations, provider-reported, as of June 30, 2026) and subscriptions (households, self-reported, over a calendar year) use different units and periods, so a gap between them is a signal, not an exact count.

This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.

Funding programs

BEAD figures come from NTIA's one-page Final Proposal overviews for each state, as printed; NTIA notes on each that the figures are based on the state's submission and subject to change pending NTIA curing and NIST final review and award. NTIA publishes no such overview for the District of Columbia. Capital Projects Fund allocations come from the Treasury, USDA ReConnect awards from USAspending.gov (a lower bound, because not every award is posted there), and Lifeline, Affordable Connectivity Program and Connect America Fund figures from the Universal Service Administrative Company's open data. Each carries its own date on the page.

The long view before 2022

Before the National Broadband Map, providers reported coverage on FCC Form 477 by census block: a whole block counted as served if one location in it could be. Those figures, from December 2016 to June 2021, are shares of people, not locations, and they overstate coverage, especially for fixed wireless. Where we show them, the chart marks the 2022 break and the two series are never joined into one line.

What these figures cannot tell you

• Whether you can get service at an address. Only the FCC map, the provider and an installation appointment can answer that.
• Prices. The FCC data contain none. Providers must show prices on a broadband facts label at the point of sale; the FCC's urban rate survey sets benchmarks for subsidized carriers, not typical prices.
• Real speeds. Every speed here is the maximum a provider advertises, not a measurement.
• That the data are right. Availability is provider-reported. Anyone can challenge a listing on the FCC map, providers must respond, and corrections flow into later revisions; that is why we refresh with every revision.

Corrections and updates

We rebuild the data with each FCC revision and each new release; the updates page lists the release calendar, every change to the data and any correction. To report an error, write to [email protected].