Re: [AFMUG] FCC Form 477

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 07:43:39 -0700

Mike is talking about "deployment data" (represented as covered census blocks) wouldn't come from billing system. This wouldn't come from a billing system, it would come from something like a towercoverage.com 477 export. Blocks are generally very small.

Plat would export subscriber data, which would be by tract, by plan. Tracts are generally much larger than blocks, especially in rural areas.

That being said, there shouldn't ever be any subscriber data where that tract doesn't have several blocks represented as covered by your deployment data, at least not anything grossly far away. It's certainly possible that there are customers where your deployment data doesn't represent (maybe you did a point to point link to a large ranch of some kind, have 4-5 services out there, but never added that ranch AP to your coverage - you'll have customers in that tract, but no deployment data showing you cover it).

One ISP I work with uses Plat and in some cases, the ISP only has the customer's billing address in Plat, which is out of state. When we export for 477, they show subscribers out of state in areas the deployment data doesn't support. We manually clean these up; we sort the 477 export by FIPS, find the out of area ones, "move" them to other populous FIPS locations and submit it. It's not perfect and generally less than 1%, but it does make it cleaner. If a "service address" had been entered in Plat with the correct local address, it would have geocoded it correctly, ignoring the billing address.

Jesse DuPont

Network Architect
email: jesse.dup...@celeritycorp.net
Celerity Networks LLC

Celerity Broadband LLC
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On 8/28/17 8:27 AM, Adam Moffett wrote:
Maybe they resell something in that other location.  If they're using a system (like Plat) which generates covered blocks based on where your customers are, then something you resell in another area would show up in the report.

I'm wondering what the opinion is on partially covered blocks these days.  If you cover a portion of a census block, do you claim it or not?  I think many operators (including some large ones) are claiming coverage of any census block they touch.  I've heard at least one claim that it's a defensive move to prevent people getting government funding to overbuild them.  Incidentally, it also prevents yourself from getting government funding to build there so I'm thinking it isn't such a wise choice.



------ Original Message ------
From: "Mike Hammett" <af...@ics-il.net>
Sent: 8/28/2017 9:36:02 AM
Subject: [AFMUG] FCC Form 477

On your Federal Communications Commission Form 477, make sure your stated coverage is at least somewhat representative of what you actually cover. In doing some market research, I keep finding ISPs (not just WISPs) obviously based out of one or two towns in one state, but have claimed some census blocks in other states. This seems very much so an error in the filing and not an expansion network.


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