Co-sponsored talk by the PEW Broadband Access Initiative & the Quello Center
with Laasya Koduru, PhD Student at UC Santa Barbra
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 2-3 PM EST
Via Zoom | Please Register HERE
Effective broadband policy depends on accurate, granular data on service availability, speeds, and prices—yet existing datasets are often self-reported, inconsistent, and insufficient for evaluating affordability or targeting public investments. This talk will introduce the Broadband-Plan Querying Tool (BQT), which independently collects advertised broadband plans directly from ISP websites at street-address resolution to provide a more reliable evidence base. It will show how BQT enabled audits of the FCC’s Connect America Fund (CAF), revealing significant gaps in serviceability and compliance, and how the enhanced code-free BQT+ now supports over 50 ISPs to power statewide assessments such as the Pew and JCOTS studies on affordability, competition, and BEAD readiness. The talk will conclude with a roadmap for BQT+ as a sustainable data resource—supporting challenge processes, monitoring affordability over time, and equipping states with the independent data needed to design effective, equitable broadband interventions.
Laasya Koduru is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), co-advised by Professor Arpit Gupta and Professor Elizabeth Belding. Their research is focused on enabling data-driven policymaking to achieve universal access to high-quality and affordable broadband networks. This involves addressing the disparities in internet access and digital equity, which inform policy actions like subsidy programs, rate regulations, and infrastructure funding. However, a significant gap exists between the broadband data currently used for policy decisions and the precise data needed. Often, these datasets are sparse, noisy, or based on unreliable self-reported information, leading to potentially flawed funding decisions that disproportionately affect underserved areas. To address this, there is an urgent need to develop a sustainable, open digital infrastructure to bridge this data gap and provide accurate data for effective policymaking.
The broadband plan querying tool (BQT) automates interaction with an ISP’s web interface to obtain the set of Internet access plans (prices and speeds) available at a street-level residential address. BQT captures the Broadband nutrition label, which includes data for all available plans such as the maximum upload speeds, download speeds, and corresponding prices in US dollars. It also captures any ISP discounts advertised to users. In its current version (BQT+), BQT+ offers improved robustness and scalability over its predecessor. New ISPs can be more easily and quickly added, and modifications to existing ISP web interfaces are more easily accommodated. BQT+ can handle drop-down address selection and other features commonly incorporated into web pages that require user interaction. BQT and BQT+ have been applied to a variety of projects, including in partnership with multiple government and non-profit entities.