NetBridge | Devpost

Inspiration

Trivago is an aggregator for hotels, helping travelers get the best deal on a place to stay. However, in these times, most of us aren't doing much traveling. This means the Internet has become a necessity—no longer a luxury. Why isn't there a tool to help us find the best Internet Service Provider for our home? Meet NetBridge.

What it does

NetBridge is a data aggregator that finds all the ISPs available to you and matches you with the best one based on price per Mbps and user-provided ratings such as quality of customer service. As users provide feedback on their experiences, our information improves and NetBridge provides better suggestions. ISPs will use NetBridge to identify regions where their service is weak so they can focus on improving these areas. Once a better option becomes available, NetBridge users in the area will be notified.

How we built it

The FCC publishes the biannual Form 477 registration information of all Internet Service Providers that offer speeds of at least 200 kpbs. This dataset is very large at 73.5M rows; working with this data was quite cumbersome.

Database

The FCC database is stored in Cloud SQL.

API

Users provide their address, which our API uses to make a request to the US Census Geocoding API to find the FIPS census block code that this address is located in. Once this block code is found, our API queries the database for any entries that match this block code. These entries are returned to the user as the possible ISPs in the area.

Challenges we ran into

We are a team of 4 beginners and 1 intermediate. None of us have any experience with GCP, so building an app on it was quite a challenge.

Working with such a large dataset was also challenging. The dataset is a 10.7GB .csv file with 73.5M rows. Importing this into a database was one of the biggest challenges.

We initially tried to use CockroachDB as the database, but could not get access to external network resources.
Instead, we uploaded the file directly to Cloud SQL. This took some time to complete, but was successful.