What’s going on?
Good news! My project group in CS 467 has made great progress on the PAgCASA Device Broadband Data project. It definitely seems a bit late in the semester to be introducing our project to you, but sometimes that’s life. We are working with Precision Ag Connectivity & Accuracy Stakeholder Alliance (PAgCASA) and one of their main foci is to help provide equal representation of Americans’ internet availability. The main reason? Data collection between Federal and State is fundamentally flawed.
From our Project Report:
According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in their 2019 report nearly 21 million Americans were without broadband. However, according to analysis by BroadbandNow Research they state that the former number should be nearly double, 42 million Americans are without broadband. The cause of this discrepancy? Flawed reporting by the FCC with their Form 477, basically stating that if a single household within a census block is reported to have service via an internet service provider (ISP) then all of the households in the census block are reported to be covered.
So where do we come in? We are building a cloud tool based in the Google Cloud Platform that will take raw JSON data, build a database with it (BigQuery), and then send out reports to customers. The tool will be built completely within the Google Cloud Platform utilizing services such as GCS Buckets, BigQuery, Cloud Functions, and Looker Studio.
(https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/cloud-covered-whats-new-cloud-august/)
And so far, we’re about to put it all together and create our first beta version of the tool.
What’s next?
Really at this point, each member of the team has built a microservice and we are meeting this week to put everything together. I myself have built the BigQuery database structure, the dataset and Tables. Another member is working on migrating data from the buckets to BigQuery. And the last member is working on pulling data from BigQuery and sending it to customers. Hopefully everything goes well and I can present to you a finished prototype or even final draft of the tool we’re building in the next blog!
That’s one small step,
Robert Behring
