NCTA Rural Broadband Experience

NCTA – The Internet & Television Association is a leading advocate for innovation and connectivity in the United States, representing the nation’s broadband and cable providers. A key focus of their work is expanding high-speed internet access in rural communities, ensuring underserved regions have the same opportunities for education, healthcare, and commerce as urban centers. To highlight these efforts, NCTA’s partners produced the mini-documentary Every Last Mile, showcasing broadband initiatives across rural America. Our role was to create a supporting microsite that transformed these stories into an engaging, interactive digital experience.

Storytelling through geography

The microsite was built to feature multimedia-driven user stories (images, video, and written accounts), each tied to specific regions across the country. To unify these narratives, we developed an interactive map experience, where each story was connected to its geographic location. As users scrolled through the content, they were seamlessly “flown” across the United States, traveling from region to region in sync with the storytelling.

Technology and implementation

The front end of the application was built using React and TypeScript, relying on a deep integration with the Mapbox API to handle all geographic rendering. We customized the visuals by designing a custom map skin with additional layers and implemented precise control over the map’s camera orientation, altitude, and movement, which allowed us to create smooth, deliberate transitions between regions. Furthermore, we built a dynamic system to draw and animate SVG overlays in real-time for highlighting states and multi-state regions, and engineered custom animations to synchronize scrolling interactions with geographic navigation.

Key outcomes

The result was a rich, interactive storytelling platform that combined multimedia narratives with a geospatial framework. By extending Mapbox beyond its standard capabilities, the microsite delivered an immersive experience that contextualized NCTA’s rural broadband initiatives and underscored the importance of connectivity across diverse regions of the United States.