Efficiently Locate Competitive Opportunities Using GIS

Broadband service providers (BSPs) frequently invest months, and sometimes years, considering areas for network expansion. It’s a complex business decision—however, modern geographic information system (GIS) technology presents significant process efficiencies by filtering out irrelevant data and helping you pinpoint the most promising areas of interest.

Accessing and utilizing public FCC GIS data from the National Broadband Map without advanced assistive technology can be a cumbersome task. Some companies expend significant time and effort in a trial-and-error approach, attempting to meticulously map out landscapes to identify areas with service gaps.

This process can be compared to trying to map a donut to locate the hole, with the uncertainty of whether you're investing time mapping an area where no "hole" exists.

Imagine being able to pinpoint the "hole" directly without the need to spend time mapping out the entire donut. With current broadband analytics tools, like one we've deleloped, this is now achievable.

Great broadband analytics technology has the capability to condense a three-week manual discovery task into a mere three hours. By strategically applying filters to GIS and broadband data, it unveils opportunities tailored to your criteria while filtering out irrelevant information. The process is quick and efficient; and critically, it enables you to visually identify optimal locations for development at a glance.

From a competitive standpoint, you’re able to set the boundaries and create a map that will filter for:

Competitive Analysis: Identifying the companies currently providing service in the area allows you to select opportunities that slign with your strengths.
Available Speeds: Uncovering the highest speeds provided by service providers in an area can assist in pinpointing communities are currently underserved.
Median Income and Property Values: Understanding the community’s economic metric, such as the median household income and the average selling price of local property, is crucial in making the business case for fiber deployment.
Population Density: Revealing whether an area is rural and thinly populated, thus potentially raising the expenses of your fiber build, or is a suburban community or town where you could potentially offer fiber service to numerous homes and businesses at a relatively low cost.

For example, you could build a query that would show at a glance the communities or areas in Georgia, where:

The only competitors are DSL providers or cable companies.
The average speed is less than 50 Mbps.
The annual median income is $40,000 or greater.
The housing density is 70 houses per square mile or higher.

By having the flexibility to adjust your query as necessary, you can quickly refind the results to focus on the opportunities that align with your broadband expansion objectives. Moreover, as the outcomes are presented visually, you'll be able to identify, in mere moments rather than weeks, areas that hold potential for the expansion of your fiber network.

Broadband analytics technology can help you identify potential markets efficiently, saving valuable time by eliminating consideration of communities that don't align with your business objectives. This streamlined planning process not only saves time but also accelerates your speed to market, offering the opportunity to seize the initiative and capitalize on opportunities ahead of competitors.