A profile of visual analytical toolkits for understanding the spatio-temporal evolution of broadband provision

•Visual analytics (VA) toolkits are underutilized in telecommunications policy analysis.•VA toolkits provide important insights about spatio-temporal trends in broadband provision.•VA toolkits can identify places with similar temporal trajectories in broadband provision.•VA can analyze trends in broadband datasets from different government agencies (e.g. FCC and NTIA).

Problems with currently available broadband data sources highlight the pressing need for novel data analytical methods and tools that enable policy makers to explore broadband market dynamics. Given this pressing need, the goal of this paper is to discuss the current state-of-the-art in geovisual analytic tools that could be applied to broadband analysis and demonstrate how these toolkits may be applied to answer important policy questions about the spatio-temporal evolution of broadband markets.