Cell coverage at US federal campgrounds

Download

• Campgrounds (CSV)One row per federal camping facility, with each national carrier's reported technology, speed tier and environment at that point. This is the full dataset.4,783 rows · 1.4 MB campground-cell-coverage.csv
• Summary by state (CSV)One row per state: how many facilities, and how many have no national carrier reported at the site, none within about half a mile, and all three.49 rows · 2 KB campground-cell-coverage-by-state.csv
• Campgrounds (GeoJSON)The same facilities as points with their kind, each carrier's status and the half-mile and regional flags, ready for QGIS, Mapbox, Leaflet or a notebook.4,783 rows · 2.1 MB campground-cell-coverage.geojson
• Data package descriptor (JSON)Frictionless descriptor: schema, sources, licence, and links to every file.3 KB datapackage.json

Read this before you use it

• None reported is not the same as no signal.

  These are the coverage areas carriers report to the FCC, drawn from their own network models. Nobody measured anything at the campground. Terrain, trees, weather and a busy tower all change what a phone actually gets, for better or worse. Never use this file to decide whether a phone, or a 911 call, will work somewhere.

• "At the site" and "within half a mile" are different numbers.

  2,131 facilities have no national carrier reported at the campground itself. For 980 of those, at least one carrier reports coverage within about half a mile, often up the road or on a ridge. That leaves 1,151 (24%) with nothing reported at or near the site. Quote the one that fits your question, and say which.

• Only the three national carriers get their own columns.

  Regional carriers report to the FCC too, and some cover rural areas the big three do not. They share one regional_carrier_reported flag. A campground can show none reported for Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile and still have a regional carrier reporting coverage there.

• Each campground is one point, and big ones are not.

  A facility sits at the single coordinate Recreation.gov gives it, usually the entrance or the middle. A large campground can have coverage at one loop and none at another.

• Federal facilities only, and not only campgrounds.

  The source covers Forest Service, Army Corps, Park Service, BLM and Reclamation sites. State parks and private campgrounds are not in it. Of the 4,783 rows, 3,720 are campgrounds, 448 are group camps and 615 are cabins or lookouts. Filter on facility_kind if you only want campgrounds.

What the data shows

All three national carriers report coverage at 25% of sites. Of the 100 most booked campgrounds on Recreation.gov, 14 have no national carrier reported at the site, and sites with none reported took 20% of the bookings in this file. The table covers every state with at least 25 federal camping facilities, least covered first.

Where it comes from

Two federal sources, joined on location. Recreation.gov supplies the campgrounds and their booking counts. The FCC supplies what each carrier says it covers, on a grid of small hexagons about a tenth of a square kilometre each. A campground takes the claims of the hexagon its coordinates fall in. A carrier with no claim there but one within two rings of hexagons (about half a mile) is marked as reported nearby.

Please carry both credits with our CC BY 4.0 compilation. Recreation.gov asks for "Data Source: Recreation.gov" and a link. The FCC asks every product built on its data to say: This product uses the FCC Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the FCC.

What is in each row

One row per facility, 4,783 in all. Each row starts with the Recreation.gov facility id, name, agency, recreation area, state, coordinates, site count and booking count. Then come four columns per national carrier: status, technology, speed tier and environment (outdoor_stationary, or outdoor_and_in_vehicle where the carrier also claims coverage in a moving car). The speed tier is the minimum the carrier claims, such as 5/1 or 35/3 Mbps down and up, not a speed test. The row ends with the regional carrier flag, how many national carriers report coverage at the site, the half-mile flag and the FCC data date. The state summary file has the counts from the table above for every state. Full field definitions, formats and source links live in datapackage.json, which is a standard Frictionless descriptor, so most data tooling can read the release without any of this page.

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