The FCC’s National Broadband Map (NBM) elicited a dramatic response on its inaugural day Feb. 17: website requests averaged more than 1,000 per second, FCC Geographic Information Officer Michael Byrne wrote on the NBM blog. The map aims to increase transparency and understanding of broadband infrastructure and technology across the US, “empowering consumers, researchers, policy makers, and developers to truly understand what broadband means in America,” according to the news release.
Industry reactions have been quite mixed, with accuracy of the data, or lack therof, the biggest issue of contention. The Telecompetitor community had much to say about this map project. Regardless, it certainly generated a lot of interest. Byrne offered up the following additional first-day metrics for the NBM website:
- Total hits: 158,123,884
- Hits served by cache: 141,068,348 (89.21%)
- Total Bytes Transferred: 863 GB
- Peak Requests per Second: 8,970
- Average Requests per Second: 1,095
- Visits in the first 10 hours: over 500,000
The response has prompted NBM project staff to triple their efforts, he added, by making infrastructure enhancements, including horizontal scaling of servers, adding more memory and caching to the maps, tuning the server architecture and working with third-party application developers. We’ll have to see if these improvements address the accuracy questions.
