[WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary – I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information right. Unfortunately, 99% of the completed Form477 reports that you have received probably have a substantial amount of inaccurate data in them. II can send the inaccurate data that we have, and then you can check us off the list. That is probably what we will end up doing. In reality, we probably won’t have a truly accurate report until the next one is due. I would be happy to provide a computer, Internet connection and a quiet room for an FCC intern if you would like to send someone out to participate in the data collection process. I realize that this is not a likely possibility, but I figured it doesn’t hurt to make the offer. I really do appreciate the thought process behind collecting this information. I am one of the founding members and past president of WISPA, the Wireless ISP trade association, and we have actively encouraged our members to complete this report and comply with FCC regulations regarding our industry. I want to comply with the data reporting requirements of the Form477 report and will commit as much of my available resources as I can
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Related side-note. The wife of one of our installers just got hired on as a census worker. She got a handheld terminal (can't remember the name brand) with fingerprint recognition, built-in GPS capabilities, etc. Will be interesting to see what the next census data set looks like. Randy Matt Larsen - Lists wrote: I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary – I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information right. Unfortunately, 99% of the completed Form477 reports that you have received probably have a substantial amount of inaccurate data in them. II can send the inaccurate data that we have, and then you can check us off the list. That is probably what we will end up doing. In reality, we probably won’t have a truly accurate report until the next one is due. I would be happy to provide a computer, Internet connection and a quiet room for an FCC intern if you would like to send someone out to participate in the data collection process. I realize that this is not a likely possibility, but I figured it doesn’t hurt to make the offer. I really do appreciate the thought process
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Hi Matt, This was a great note to the FCC! Well done. This doesn't help me, since I am an urban WISP, but my guess is that as you stated a lot of rural WISPs either had this problem and knew it and just decided to file inaccurate data or didn't know the data was inaccurate. It certainly should help the FCC to know that they chose a parameter that wasn't as easy as they stated (here is a list of vendors for Geocoding info : ). I know I had to do mine by hand and contemplated just picking a few tracts to enter for all my customers, which would have been very inaccurate. Martha Martha Huizenga DC Access, LLC 202-546-5898 */Friendly, Local, Affordable, Internet!/**/ Connecting the Capitol Hill Community /* Matt Larsen - Lists wrote: I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary – I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information right. Unfortunately, 99% of the completed Form477 reports that you have received probably have a substantial amount of inaccurate data in them. II can send the inaccurate data that we have, and then you can check us off the list. That is probably what we will end up
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
The terminal are made by Harris Gino A. Villarini g...@aeronetpr.com Aeronet Wireless Broadband Corp. tel 787.273.4143 fax 787.273.4145 -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Randy Cosby Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 1:03 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 Related side-note. The wife of one of our installers just got hired on as a census worker. She got a handheld terminal (can't remember the name brand) with fingerprint recognition, built-in GPS capabilities, etc. Will be interesting to see what the next census data set looks like. Randy Matt Larsen - Lists wrote: I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to CR and Road xxx and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn't code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect - not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary - I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information right. Unfortunately, 99% of the completed Form477 reports that you have received probably have a substantial amount of inaccurate data in them. II can send the inaccurate data that we have, and then you can check us off the list. That is probably what we will end up doing. In reality, we probably won't have
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
You're actually fairly lucky when it comes to figuring out what census tract your customers are in - NE and WY have very large census tracts. I can understand why this would be a better way to go about collecting data than ZIP codes (in the most rural areas around here, one extremely rural area will be bundled into the ZIP for a smaller town that has access, and so you'll see the ZIP listed on 477 data as having 5 providers when there's really nothing but satellite available). But you are right, census tract data is not something that ANYONE collects unless they're doing academic research or compiling government data (as is the case here). I'm sure you've seen this already, but for those that haven't, hopefully it'll help.. of course the map will change again next year for the new census. http://www.census.gov/geo/www/maps/descriptwindows/outline.htm InLine vickie edwards, MPA | Grant Specialist InLine Connections Solutions Through Technology 600 Lakeshore Pkwy Birmingham AL, 35209 205-278-8106 [p] 205-941-1934[f] vedwa...@inline.com www.InLine.com All Quotes from InLine are only valid for 30 days. This message and any attached files may contain confidential information and are intended solely for the message recipient. If you are not the message recipient you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. If verification is required please request a hard-copy version. From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Matt Larsen - Lists Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 11:50 AM To: WISPA General List; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Group Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to CR and Road xxx and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn't code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect - not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary – I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information right. Unfortunately, 99% of the completed Form477 reports that you have received probably have a substantial amount of inaccurate data in them. II can send the inaccurate data that we have, and then you can check us off
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. Regards Michael Baird I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better progress on it going forward, but I cannot make any guarantees on when we will get the data completed. This leaves me with a quandary – I can either provide you with timely, but inaccurate information that is going to skew your data, or I can take the time to get the information
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Unfortunately, this doesn't resolve anything for me. NONE of the geocoding engines have the data for the customers that are not accurate in my system. The hole in the process has to do with the county level information is not up to date or not provided to the geocoding service. This is also a problem with doing local number portability, as we have found out on a couple of occasions. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com Michael Baird wrote: For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. Regards Michael Baird I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Do you know if it can handle grid-coordinate addresses? Around here we have addresses like N96 W32XXX County Line Rd So far I've tried Google Earth, Google Maps, Yahoo, MapPoint, and Manifold GIS and none of them can consistently geocode that address format. On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Michael Baird m...@tc3net.com wrote: For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. Regards Michael Baird I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower to devote dedicated time to this data collection so we have distributed this project among several employees and are making as much progress as we can when our workflow allows for it. After a month, we are about 10% of the way through it. We are now entering our slower time of the year, so hopefully we will make a little bit better
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Michael Baird wrote: For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. If your users are in a rural area, don't depend on this for too much. (Nothing against this specific service, I'd not heard of it before today, just a general cautionary tale.) We initially sent our data to a WISPA member who was offering geocoding services. He was only able to provide a census tract for about 2/3 of the addresses we sent (which were, admittedly, just dumped right from the billing system with little attempt at standardization). Of those, maybe 3/4 were accurate at first glance. Honestly, there's only so much any database can do with Rural Route 2, for instance, when that mail route covers 20+ square miles over three census tracts. I'm fortunate that our network is relatively small (there were only about twenty tracts, period, and a decent percentage of our customers are in cities large enough that these computerized geocoders were accurate). Ultimately, I just gave one of the in-house techs some census maps, a customer list, and Google Earth, and said Saturdays are pretty quiet, good luck, do the best you can. Since we only had a couple weeks between when the FCC released the final version of 477, and when it was due, it was a bit harrowing. I have no doubt there are a few errors in our submission, but we did the best we can with our limited resources and budget. Anyway, the long rambling point of this is that if you have any outside source do this work, you'll want to sanity-check it before sending it in. David Smith MVN.net WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Right, Matt. Even with zip code included we had some come back in the wrong county. A couple were even in the wrong state. Matt Larsen - Lists wrote: Unfortunately, this doesn't resolve anything for me. NONE of the geocoding engines have the data for the customers that are not accurate in my system. The hole in the process has to do with the county level information is not up to date or not provided to the geocoding service. This is also a problem with doing local number portability, as we have found out on a couple of occasions. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com Michael Baird wrote: For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. Regards Michael Baird I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to CR and Road xxx and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn't code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect -- not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract data. However, I do not have the manpower
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Here is a copy of a post I made back in March about the relationships to Tracts, Zip codes, Census Bock Groups and Census Blocks, the full post is here with views to larger map images: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22157982-National-Broadband-availability-a- simple-solution-to-mapping National Broadband availability a simple solution to mapping [del] Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA Polygons) [del] Census Tracts [del] Census Block Groups [del] Census Blocks (smaller thumbnails) The 350 million dollars allocated for a national broadband mapping is way more than necessary. Read through this message to get an idea of the issue and examine the attached maps to see what we are dealing with using any particular level of mapping detail. This is obviously just my opinion but one worth consideration. I have attached map images of Tom Green County, Texas with the different polygons the Census Bureau uses in their demographic tabulations. I chose this county because it seems to be a decent cross section of rural America but also has a high population density area. »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Green_···y,_Texas Here are the raw numbers, but you need to look at the attached images to see how the totals can be deceiving when compared to the map: Zip Code Tabulation areas = 13 Polygons (These polygons are made up by the Census Bureau, the post office does not create zip code polygons, zip codes are linear routing for them) The FCC already has this data collected using the Form 477. Census Tracts = 23 Polygons (look in the rural areas outside San Angelo to see that they are actually much bigger than the zip code areas) This is the level of reporting required on the new Form 477. Census Block Groups = 101 Polygons Census Blocks = 5241 Polygons (even in the rural areas these are much smaller than Tracts or Zip Codes). Blocks are the most granular level studied by the Census. The problem with the FCC data in the current state is, if there is just one single customer reported as served in a polygon, they show the whole area as being served by broadband. We know the number of households in each of the polygons (Census 2000 Figures). If the FCC totaled the number of subscribers for all form 477 respondents (by zip code) and then divided that by the total households, we could have a percentage of the households served within each polygon. This would be much better than an all or nothing reporting method. This would also not cost anywhere near 350 million dollars to report broadband availability to the public. If the total subscribers was aggregated by all carriers (removing the data for Satellite Internet), you would not know the specific totals for each provider, thus preserving private information. Just thought I would post this for all to see and become familiar with the issue. Thank You, Brian Webster -Original Message- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org]on Behalf Of Martha Huizenga Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 12:59 PM To: WISPA General List Cc: w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Group Subject: Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 Hi Matt, This was a great note to the FCC! Well done. This doesn't help me, since I am an urban WISP, but my guess is that as you stated a lot of rural WISPs either had this problem and knew it and just decided to file inaccurate data or didn't know the data was inaccurate. It certainly should help the FCC to know that they chose a parameter that wasn't as easy as they stated (here is a list of vendors for Geocoding info : ). I know I had to do mine by hand and contemplated just picking a few tracts to enter for all my customers, which would have been very inaccurate. Martha Martha Huizenga DC Access, LLC 202-546-5898 */Friendly, Local, Affordable, Internet!/**/ Connecting the Capitol Hill Community /* Matt Larsen - Lists wrote: I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite
Re: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477
Garbage in, garbage out, sorry didn't read enough of the thread, I thought it was about the FCC filing process being to much of a burden, not about record keeping issues. Regards Michael Baird Unfortunately, this doesn't resolve anything for me. NONE of the geocoding engines have the data for the customers that are not accurate in my system. The hole in the process has to do with the county level information is not up to date or not provided to the geocoding service. This is also a problem with doing local number portability, as we have found out on a couple of occasions. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com Michael Baird wrote: For next time, check http://www.geocode.com/, it cost about $35 per 1000, and does all that you need to do to submit the data. Regards Michael Baird I know and feel your pain there. Luckily we do not have that many customers but 75% of our customer addresses does not geocode and we are doing something similar as your doing with #2 where the installers have to try to pin point the correct right location for the install. Pain is the installs done by installers that are no longer with us. I think its a great idea what they are doing but lack of proper automated query systems and in accurate address databases that can not handle the addresses we feed makes the progress harder and slow. /Eje Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Matt Larsen - Lists li...@manageisp.com Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:41 To: WISPA General Listwireless@wispa.org; w...@part-15.org; Motorola Canopy User Groupmotor...@wispa.org Subject: [WISPA] Response to the FCC Regarding Form 477 I thought I would share this email that I just sent to the FCC regarding the Form 477 report. I am late filing this report because we don't have accurate data and thought that my reasons why were worth sharing with my colleagues. I support what the FCC is trying to do with Form477, but was not able to in good conscience turn in our data by the report deadline. I hope that this is valuable to some of you out there. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com --- Hi Suzanne, I am not really in a position where I can give a projected date to have this information completed for you. However, I do feel it would be valuable to explain why and provide you and your management some more information as to why I am unable to give you a better date on when we intend to have it completed. For background, Vistabeam (Inventive Wireless of Nebraska) is a wireless ISP that covers about 40,000 square miles in Nebraska and Wyoming. We have around 2000 customers spread out across this very thinly populated area. Even though we are quite small in customer number compared to other ISPs, we have a very good billing and provisioning system and quite a bit of detail on our customers. However, we did not have census tract information for our customers as there had never been a need for it until the latest Form477 notice came out earlier this year. Once we received the Form477 notice, we made plans to modify our billing system to add the census tract information, which we were successful in doing. We also studied how to obtain geocoding information from multiple sources and how to integrate this into our database so that we could complete the report. Our initial integration seemed to be successful until we started to look at the geocoding data that we received and realized that over 50% of the census tract information was invalid. After going through this data, we found that many of the addresses we have for customers are simply not being processed and located correctly. The majority of our customers are in rural areas with references to “CR” and “Road xxx” and other rural address forms that the geocoding engines simply cannot process. Many of these rural counties do not have GIS departments with the ability to provide the geocoding information for these addresses. In the event that the address doesn’t code, the geocoding engine returns the census tract information for the nearest Post Office, which is not in the correct census tract. To get the correct information, we basically have two options. Option #1 is to drive out to every customer with a GPS unit and record the information into our system. Since we have approximately 1100 customers with inaccurate information, this is going to be a time consuming process and would cost us several thousand dollars to collect – not to mention the lost man hours. Option #2 is to go through each customer record and use Google Earth and the driving directions to each customer location to determine the census tract. This takes about five minutes per customer record, so we are looking at about 92 man hours to get that data assembled and inserted into our customer database. We have chosen to go with Option #2 to collect the invalid census tract
