Google recently announced that they will be adding Google Fiber high speed network and TV to my area. This was great news, because it will give us more choices ... and a little competition among providers tends to make them all 'try harder' to please the customer. :-)
I was curious what other areas have Google Fiber, and did a few web searches and came up with a couple of maps. But neither of them allowed me to quickly/intuitively 'see' what I was wanting to see.
Here's the map from the Washington Post:
And here's the map from Google itself:
All I can really tell by glancing at those maps is the city locations. I have to study them intently, and read the color legend, and match up the (non-intuitive) markers to the color legend, to determine which are current/planned/potential Google Fiber cities.
So, of course, I set out to try to create a better map with SAS ... In my map, I wanted to make it easy to identify the cities that currently have Google Fiber, therefore I made their marker the brightest, and also added a check-mark in it. I made the 'planned' cities slightly lighter, with no check-mark. And the potential cities are just a light gray. Also, if you click the snapshot below and view the interactive version of my map, it has html hover-text and you can click on the markers to launch a Google search for more information about Google Fiber in that city.
What do you think of my new version of the map? What other changes & enhancements would you recommend?
5 Comments
It would be interesting to see how these locations compare to the locations with Verizon's FIOS.
How about making the radii of the circles proportional to the number of inhabitants?
That could be a nice addition to the map, Per! But, of course, the "devil is in the details" ... it might be a bit difficult to get an exact population number, because it's not necessarily just the population of the one city, but also might include several surrounding cities (more like a metropolitan statistical area). For example, "Raleigh-Durham" also includes Cary, Morrisville, Carrboro, Chapel Hill, and Garner. And "Kansas City" includes 16 surrounding cities.
A lot easier to read! I like how you've emphasized the states with a dark grey and the check-mark is a great idea. Good techniques to remember...
Thanks!