Yes they do want it by tract. The best way to study this is down to the census block. Census blocks are small geographic areas and in states like California and Illinois there are about half a million blocks. WISPA and the WISP industry has been asking for some way to quantify some sort of numbers that they can quote when talking about the WISP industry as a whole.
I would LOVE to map exactly where EVERY WISP covers with their RF signal and then do a household count at the census block level. That is the most accurate. However, I don't have every WISP's RF footprint and I don't have the volunteer time to do every state separately and then add up the nation as a whole. You can't put the whole country together as one file of census blocks, it's too much data. I could do this and I also have all of the blocks covered by cable and DSL so I could tabulate the number of homes WISP's cover that those industries don't. It all takes time and I can't do that for free nor am I willing to give up the information about the cable and DSL coverage since I paid a large sum of money for that data set. The zip code method was something that I could do on a nationwide basis without taking a huge amount of my time. It's a start. If the industry really wants more accurate numbers I am available for hire. This is how I make a living. Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: David E. Smith [mailto:d...@mvn.net] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2011 10:40 AM To: bwebs...@wirelessmapping.com; WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Households and population passed by the WISP industry..... over 76 Million households On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 22:43, Brian Webster <bwebs...@wirelessmapping.com> wrote: A week or so ago, I ran a study of the population and households passed by principal WISPA members. Tonight I ran the numbers based on the whole national WISP coverage map you all contributed to over the last couple of years. The method for the calculation is pretty basic. For every zip code tabulation area there is a standard recognized centroid point. I took the big yellow national WISP coverage blob http://www.wirelessmapping.com/National-Coverage-Map-for-Fixed-Wireless-ISP% 27s.php and selected all of the zip code centroid points contained within it. I found a database table of households and populations for these zip code tabulation areas. The numbers are based on the 2000 census data so it's a bit stale. Isn't this exactly why the FCC now requests counts by census tract? ZIP codes are awfully big in some places, and just because an ISP can service one person in a ZIP, doesn't guarantee they can service everyone. David Smith MVN.net
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