One counts the places where service cannot be bought. That is the map public money follows. The other counts the places where it can be bought and nobody does. That is the map a build’s payback follows. In California they differ by 20×.
Every party in this market has been handed a map of availability and asked to make a decision about revenue. The industry says so itself: “a home passed is a unit of infrastructure — it is not a subscriber, not a satisfied customer and not a return on invested capital.”
Both layers published by the CPUC. Joined block-by-block on GEOID20, 655,000 rows, fully paged.
The revenue gap is 20.4× the funded one, in households — and it is somewhere else on the map.
Fresno County alone: 3,818 households can’t buy; 64,137 can buy and don’t.
The take-rate map is blind precisely where the money goes. Most tools would inner-join the two layers, drop those blocks and report a tidy number. We keep them as a fourth row of the matrix and colour it amber: an absence, not a zero.
Availability down, take-rate band across, cell area ∝ households. Click any cell and the whole application adopts that population — map, reading, provider list, block table, URL. Fresno County, EOY 2024, at 100/20 Mbps:
| 0 / ? ⚠ | ≤20% | ≤40% | ≤60% | ≤80% | >80% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Served | 2,508 |
11,742 |
16,316 |
36,079 |
82,105 |
146,040 |
| Unserved | 119 |
298 |
103 |
108 |
· |
17 |
| Priority Unserved | 3,038 |
50 |
85 |
· | · |
· |
| No take-rate record ⚠ | 5,063 blocks — no take-rate published at all | |||||
The widest thing on the screen is a measurement nobody took.
CPUC publishes it in six 20-point bands. The app says “≤ 60 %”. It will not say “47 %”.
One code, two facts. Amber, excluded from headlines by default, and a toggle that shows you exactly what including it costs: 16.8× → 17.5×.
Availability is provider-reported. Ookla’s open tiles could flag a disagreement; they are a sample of speed tests, not a census of subscribers, so they never move a number.
No public cost-per-passing exists for California. A dial with an invented default would make the map a function of a number we made up.
Every figure on screen carries a printed derivation — service, field name, vintage, join type, caveat. Seven lines, on the page, not in a log.
| Finding | What it means |
|---|---|
| California publishes no broadband data | All 2,569 endpoints in the state’s known ArcGIS estate: zero availability layers, zero adoption, zero provider registers. Maryland publishes three. Virginia publishes two. |
| An eighth server, found in a Leaflet config | The state broadband map is Leaflet — but it loads esri-leaflet, and its config.js points at a CPUC ArcGIS server nobody had crawled. 36 services, CORS-open, adoption and availability at two vintages. |
| The federal source is unreachable | broadbandmap.fcc.gov returns 403 to any non-browser client; its data API returns 401. The only reachable FCC series is Form 477, June 2021 — the dataset the BDC replaced because it over-reported. |
| A point layer that returns no points | 215,804 broadband-serviceable locations — the unit BEAD money is counted in — are countable but not mappable. Verified across every parameter combination. |
| Two services, one dataset | “25/3 Mbps” and “any available speed” are band-for-band identical. Publishing both implies two measurements; there is one. |
VETRO, IQGeo, 3-GIS, Render, Comsof. They answer where is my cable — not who would buy from it.
CostQuest is the FCC’s Fabric contractor. It cannot be the tool that questions the availability map.
Ookla, M-Lab. They sell the meter reading.
Esri’s BEAD dashboard and Telecom Management — an enterprise agreement priced by organization size.
We have no map to defend, so we can hold both up at once — and show you the part of the first one that nobody has measured.
A GIS admin describes the application; the authoring commands write the map spec, the symbology, the popups and the panels. The research, the data catalogue and this application were produced in a single working session.
The trap assertions are inverted on purpose: they pass while the trap is still there. If CPUC ever fixes one, the suite fails and tells us the research is stale. That is the difference between a demo and an instrument.
We will show you the same ground under the other definition, how many households sit in each cell, and how much of your funded gap has never been measured. If the two agree, you have lost an afternoon. They have not agreed yet.