Avoiding A $300 Million Broadband Mapping Boondoggle → does anyone bother to check anything

Ok a year ago I would have agreed. ConenctTn maping was atrotious and very wrong. Checked it lately and very accurate. At least in my area. And yes I'm anal about this and I KNOW where broadband begins and ends in almost every corner in my county( kind of a hobby of sorts I suppose ). They even differentiate between cable/dsl and wireless and they don't count satellite. Which they shouldn't because it sucks and shouldn't count. So far I have yet to find an area that says it a carrier provides broadband in which the reality is they don't. So unless someone has bothered to do the legwork like me I think their opinions should be taken with HUGE grain of salt.

For $300 million dollars the data should belong to the government and not AT&T!

The data belongs to everyone.

Where do you go to check it?

Where do I go to check what specfically

You were saying that you the availability noted on connected nations site was fairly accurate, I wanted to check a few places myself.

well I can only speak for ConenctedTn and only for my area. Well ConenctedTn has pretty detailed maps. So I get uplcose and then use Google maps to try to get addresses in the area in questions. I also use reverse look-up in whitepages.com to get all the addresses on a particular road and also phone numbers if they have them. And if I happen to be in an area I'm interested in make mental notes of addresses. I then go to the 2 ISPs in my area at&t and Charter and check to see if those addresses and phone numbers are in areas that have service.

Charter is a bit easier since you can check by both address and phone number. I also have a 3rd check by looking up channel listing for Charter by address. If you can't get Charter services at an address you won't get a channel list. Also if I enter an address/phone number that actually has service it will say there is already service at that address. You can't get any better conformation than that.

I feel I should be getting some of that $300 mil

The data does not belong to everyone according to ConnectedMN. I requested the map files for our county and was told that the data was proprietary and, due to agreements with the providers, was not available.