About

An address the federal map says is served

I'm Wes Calderón. I work remotely from a county with fewer than ten thousand people in it, and the federal broadband map says my address is served with gigabit fiber. It is not. Four providers have told me so directly, one of them twice. Working out what to do about that is how this site started: I filed an availability challenge, learned the procedure by getting parts of it wrong, and kept notes.

Not a credential — a filing cabinet

None of that is a credential, and the tone of these pages should never be allowed to imply one. I am not a network engineer, a telecom lawyer, or a regulator, and I have never worked for a provider. I have no inside line to anyone's sales department, and I cannot look up your address on a system you cannot see yourself.

What I have instead is documentation. A year of scheduled speed, latency, and packet-loss tests from a wired connection, timestamped and kept. Scanned bills going back several years, which is how I know what a promotional rate expiring looks like on paper before it looks like anything on the website. Filing receipts and correspondence from the challenge. When a page here makes a claim about a rule, it links to the rule; when it makes a claim about what a provider does, it says whether that comes from my own bill, my own log, or a document anyone can open.

This site earns nothing from your provider. There are no affiliate links, no referral codes, no commission on a sign-up, and no paid placements. It carries display advertising, and that is the whole of its business model, which is the only reason it can afford to tell you to keep the service you already have — or to cancel it.

The questions that stop being answered after the install

Type almost any home internet question into a search box and the answers come back from the people who collect a bounty when you sign up. That is not a complaint about bias in the abstract; it decides which questions get answered. Sign-up pages are answered exhaustively. Everything that happens after the install — the bill, the shortfall, the cancellation, the complaint — is answered barely or not at all, because none of it earns a commission.

Three questions are the reason this site exists.

1. What is actually available at this address? Not what the coverage map shades in. The national broadband map is built from provider-reported claims of where they could serve, and an address can sit inside a shaded polygon while every provider on the list declines to run a line to it. The map has a formal challenge process for exactly this situation, and almost nothing written for ordinary consumers explains how to use it — what evidence a challenge needs, who has to respond, and how long the provider has to answer.
2. Am I getting what the contract says? Every provider now has to publish a broadband label with a typical speed and latency on it. Very little is written about the other half of that: how to measure your own line so the numbers hold up, over enough days to be evidence rather than an anecdote, and what to do with the log once you have it.
3. Who do I go to when the provider stops answering? There is an order — the provider's own dispute process, then the FCC's informal complaint system, then a state utility commission or attorney general — and the order matters, because each step wants a record from the one before it.

There is a fourth question I keep meeting and rarely see written down honestly: fixed wireless and satellite services show an address as covered, then decline it at the qualification step, because a sector is full or a subscriber cap is reached. Affiliate sites do not explain this, since explaining it costs them a conversion.

No page here stops at the explanation. Each one hands you back something you can hold: a reading to log, a document to demand from the provider, a window that closes on a particular date.

Sources, in the order I trust them

• Rules and regulator material — FCC orders and rules including the broadband consumer label requirements, the FCC's complaint system, the National Broadband Map and its challenge procedures, and state public utility commission consumer divisions. Cited with the date I read them, because this area moves.
• The provider's own published documents — the broadband label for the plan, the residential terms of service, the fee schedule, and the equipment return policy. These contradict the sales page often enough that the contradiction is usually the story.
• Measurement I can reproduce — test methodology, wired rather than Wi-Fi, run on a schedule rather than when something feels slow, with the tool and settings named so you can run the same thing and compare.
• My own bills and logs, marked as such. Where a figure comes from one household in one county, the page says so rather than dressing it up as a national average.

Plan names, promotional rates, and provider footprints move faster than anything written about them. So the pages lean on method rather than price lists: a speed figure you can generate this evening is worth more than one I wrote down two billing cycles ago, and each page shows both the day it was written and the day it was last checked so you can judge how much of it to trust.

Four things outside my reach

• It is not an affiliate site or a comparison shopper. No page ranks providers for sign-ups, and nothing here pays a commission.
• It does not review your bill, your contract, or your speed logs for you, and it cannot tell you what is available at your specific address — it can only show you the checks that answer that.
• It is not legal advice, and filing a complaint or a challenge on the strength of a guide here is your decision, made at your own risk.
• It does not promise that escalation works. Some complaints produce a credit and a callback within a week; some produce a form letter. The point is knowing which step you are on and what record it needs.

Telling me a page is wrong

Found a number here that no longer matches your bill, or a filing form the FCC has since moved? Send me the detail through the contact form — what you saw, and where you saw it. The page gets corrected and carries a line saying what changed.