24 May Do it yourself Aliant sleuthing

Art Ortenburger is a home-schooled teenager who can’t get high-speed Internet at his home in Bonshaw, PEI, 24 km. west of Charlottetown. Ortenburger wondered how many other Islanders were beyond reach of broadband, so he crafted a set of automated computer programs to find out.

His tools submit each address from the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database to Aliant’s web page. Aliant, the only provider of DSL (or telephone-based) high speed Internet on the Island, responds with one of two messages:

Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…”

or:

Your address … does not currently qualify for Bell Aliant High Speed Internet service.

Ortenburger’s bot is polite; it only submits one query a second, so it takes several days to work through the entire database. To run the program, Ortenburger sought help from island ‘net guru Peter Rukavina, who provided a server to run the program.

The results:

Total Addresses: 68,040
Addresses with no DSL: 10,439
Addresses with Basic DSL: 19,559
Addresses with Ultra DSL: 38,039

If you download this Google Earth KML file of the no-DSL addresses and import it into your copy of Google Earth, you can zoom in to any area of the province to see the broadbandless areas close-up.

Ortenburger has released his complete toolset with an open source license, in case anyone wants to see how it works—or wants develop a similar tool.

Hat tip: Peter Rukavina via Adrian Noskwith.