Actionable Insights for Improving Broadband Access

HR&A Advisors, Inc. (HR&A) is an employee-owned company advising clients on how to increase opportunity and advance the quality of life in cities, including areas like real estate, housing, broadband digital equity, and more. Operating in more than 25 countries and 350+ cities, they are building more equitable and resilient communities.

With over 42 M Americans without access to reliable broadband and an increased reliance on digital services daily, many communities are being left behind. HR&A’s Broadband & Digital Equity practice team empowers governments and non-profit clients to close this digital divide. One of the first steps in solving this issue is to map out the communities that lack the necessary infrastructure to stay connected.

HR&A used CARTO and Amazon Redshift to streamline their data workflows, enabling real-time spatial analysis and visualization. By deploying surveys in 22 languages and leveraging spatial tools, they gathered over 5,700 responses in Colorado, achieving 89% completion rates. Their data-driven insights informed targeted efforts to improve broadband access. 

CARTO Workflows also enabled them to create spatial joins, filter and aggregate responses by count, and update this information daily to deliver important insights to their data collection partners.

HR&A selected CARTO for its seamless integration with AWS and robust geospatial capabilities. CARTO’s cloud-native platform enabled HR&A to merge and analyze diverse datasets efficiently, perform spatial joins and filters, and generate real-time dashboards while maintaining the data in Amazon Redshift.