House Hunting? This Site Touts Real

A new site aims to tackle a problem that in a more logical universe would not exist: real-estate listings that offer only vague details about the internet service available at an abode or don't even address that issue.

Fiber Homes(Opens in a new window) promises less-chancy connectivity details in house listings. The Columbia, S.C.-based site works with fiber-optic broadband providers to verify the access available at a home. It highlights matching listings with a "certified" label and details about the broadband plans available, in some cases with sign-up discounts, so home shoppers shouldn't have to check a future home's address at multiple providers’ sites to see which one offers the fastest connection.

Internet access delivered via optical fiber represents first-class home broadband, supporting equally high upload and download speeds and essentially unlimited capacity to any one residence. Fiber providers consistently lead PCMag's Fastest ISPs list.

"For it to be a certified fiber address, it means we received the addresses directly from the provider and they confirmed that they indeed can serve it with fiber," CEO Robert Gilbert wrote in an email. "So the ~2 million addresses we have certified have come directly from approximately 90 different providers from around the country."

So far, those providers—which pay Fiber Homes for the certification and the publicity unless they choose a free-listing option that doesn't include sales tools—are on the smaller side, with the biggest ones being Allo(Opens in a new window), Ting(Opens in a new window), and Point Broadband(Opens in a new window).

"This is a unique opportunity for the smaller community-based fiber providers that have historically been at a disadvantage," Gilbert wrote. "The large national providers (AT&T, Spectrum, etc.) have traditionally grabbed the lion's share of these consumers via national reseller sites (All Connect, Smart Move, Broadband Now, etc.) and the USPS ‘Change of Address’ packet."

Gilbert said he expects the site to include 4 to 5 million listings by the end of the year.

Tests of sample addresses provided by Fiber Homes, however, didn't all go smoothly—and not necessarily because of that site's fault. The "Learn More" link shown below its listings of plans (including rates and both download and upload speeds, the last detail being one that many large cable providers can't be bothered to list) sometimes led to provider pages that offered no clear way to double-check the Fiber Homes listing or even order service online.

And in one case, the provider said it didn't offer fiber service at a Fiber Homes certified address. Informed of that mismatch Wednesday evening, Gilbert said he was going to look into it.

At an address that I knew to be served by Verizon Fios, Fiber Homes defaulted to the data in the Federal Communications Commission's broadband-availability database, saying "Verizon Virginia LLC is reported to offer fiber nearby, but they may not service this home."

That's a fair way to present information sourced from the FCC map, a notoriously unreliable resource based on data submitted by providers that doesn't have to be accurate below the scale of a census block(Opens in a new window) that can span a few city blocks or hundreds of square miles. Fiber Homes can only chip away at this larger problem of inadequate connectivity cartography,which the federal government itself is still struggling to resolve as it prepares to hand out billions of dollars in broadband-buildout subsidies.

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