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 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 to get the data requested and make sure that it is as accurate as possible. Thank you for your time and consideration, Matt Larsen Vistabeam.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- 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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/