Survey Albemarle residents about their broadband

[waldoj]

ABBA did this once, but with limited success.

Louisville just created SpeedUp for this purpose, and it looks perfect. It's geo-gated, so that you can't take the survey unless you're in the appropriate area. Then it uses M-Lab to run the a test, and has visitors answer a few questions. It seems great. It's open source, designed to run on Heroku.

Of course, this does nothing to tell us where broadband is not. But it does tell us how fast broadband is where it is, which seems pretty great.

I have no idea what would go into getting the county to deploy this. My guess is that they don't have the capacity to do so. I further have no idea if it's acceptable for me to do this on my own (looks like I could stand it up in an evening), whether anybody would want to trust me with their data if I did so, and whether I'd be able to get much PR, so that folks would use the site. Those all seem like challenges to navigate.

[waldoj]

Realization: there’s no need to survey the whole county, only those areas that we are unclear about. That brings down the surveyed population by 90%, I bet.

[waldoj]

Immediate, subsequent realization: it depends on what we’re trying to learn. Is the idea to figure out who has broadband, or to figure out how fast people’s broadband connections are? I’ve been conflating these two things.

[waldoj]

Several thoughts:

• Statistics are a thing. There's no reason to contact every last human in Mill Creek. Just get a statistically-significant sample, factoring in geographic distance (i.e., distance from the DSLAM).
• When determining if people have a connection at all, that can likewise be done by targeting only those areas about which we're unclear. We can skip places where we know people have connections, and skip places where we can be certain that they do not.
• This can be done with a postcard with a QR code. Have the QR code resolve to a URL that includes their address, so with a single tap on their phone they can be running a speed test (which first verifies, via IP, that they're using their WiFi).