[wyclif]

I asked this question in a thread on a different story, then when I saw this thread I immediately thought you would be the perfect person to ask this question:

Have you ever found a way to correlate or list rural areas in the USA that already have high-speed FTTH? A lot of people here would be interested in that information, since they plan to move out of big 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier cities and will be working from home indefinitely.

[iptrans]

Very few ISPs publish service area maps, never mind accurate coverage maps. The only public data about broadband availability is based on FCC 477 forms, which is notoriously inaccurate. It's so bad that the FCC recently had to walk back claims of broadband coverage for 63 million households. The FCC data is so terrible that you can only use it to rule out coverage areas.

To get any kind of reliable data you'd have to manually try to collect information scattered all over the web. Go over ISP websites, the list of muni broadband networks, carrier portals,...

Even so, ISPs can and will readily deny service, even if they at first say that there is coverage. The only way to make sure is to order service and see if they deliver.

If you have the budget for it, you could consider using commercial services like Fiberlocator, but they mainly cater for the commercial and wholesale markets. I don't know if they cover FTTH. They may, if the network in question also offers business service. They have an API, but that's probably not included in the yearly subscription fee of just under four grand.

[jaredmauch]

our local area had to hire someone to drive all the roads and look for the telltale signs of the utilities to get an accurate map. This was taking a cross-section of a survey that went out to everyone and the FCC477 data that is filed. The accuracy in the past has been at the census tract level, which shows my area as served as someone in the census tract has service from Comcast.