Interview on National Broadband Map architecture

by Sebastian Benthall

Interview with Juan Marín Otero from Computech on development of the National Broadband Map, released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission.

The selection of open source software has been critical in my opinion. The entire project has been constructed with open source tools, from the operating system to the last JavaScript library used in the presentation layer. The main reasons are the flexibility and easy development that these solutions give us. When we evaluated the requirements of this project, some open source tools began with a clear advantage (functionality and easy to deploy) over most of the commercial tools.

Developing on open source has given us the flexibility needed in a project like this without having to worry about whether we had enough licenses per computing “core” or not, and choosing the right components for each requirement, rather than having to adopt monolithic suites with great functionality but poor performance and little chance of adaptation. One of the advantages that may seem trivial but in this work environment is very important is that I have the whole project on my laptop, and I can make changes from a Starbucks, if necessary (and I use this example because it happened to me once on the project).