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Editor's Perspective
The value of where
By Dan O'Shea
March 15, 2007
My dad still hasn't joined the broadband age, poor guy. He could have
been a DSL customer some years ago, but at the time when he was ready
to
make the leap into the broadband age, DSL wasn't available in his
neighborhood. Though that's not what the marketing department of the
local telephone company he had at the time believed was the case. To
them, he was a definite DSL prospect, and they let him know that by
sending him entire trees worth of direct mail pieces explaining their
service, what it could do for him, and how much they would be willing
to
offer him a discount.
He'd get all this marketing paraphernalia in the mail, then dutifully
call his son who worked at Telephony to discuss DSL--what its
advantages were, what the telephone company would need to do to install
it, whether or not he really needed it. To the last question, I always
said, "absolutely," mainly because I was sick of calling him and
getting
a busy signal, which happened because he was doing some online banking
via plain old dial-up. (I know--he banked online very early, but didn't
have voicemail or broadband. Go figure.)
He finally called the telephone company, probably to placate me, but
the
sales rep told him his address didn't qualify as a location that could
be served by DSL because it was too far away from the central office.
In
any case, he told the rep she was wrong because her company actually
had
been sending him a lot of literature telling him he should get DSL. She
asked him if he had entered his phone number in the DSL qualification
manager on the company's Web site--that this was the best way to find
out if his house qualified. In other words, the telco put the onus on
him to figure out whether he could buy what they had been trying so
hard
to sell him.
The interesting thing is that the telco had a capability to quickly
determine if a given location was in its service area, but some parts
of
the organization apparently didn't have access to that information. A
little bit more location intelligence spread more broadly across the
telco organization could have saved him trouble and could have saved
the
telco a few marketing dollars. Multiply that times thousands and
thousands of customers, and you're talking about some significant
potential savings.
Geocoding technology and geocoding analysis, used in conjunction with
network map visualization solutions, is the key to unlocking those
savings. That's the subject of this edition of Telephony's
Technology
Update. For a further explanation of the benefits of geocoding
analysis, see our feature story. Also, be sure to
check out our
resource
links to study up further on the concept of geographic information
systems and how the technology is evolving rapidly as we find our way
through that broadband age my dad is missing out on. Maybe one day
he'll
find the door--or better yet, maybe someone will open that door and
welcome him.
E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.
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Feature
Location
nation
By Dan O'Shea
March 15, 2007
Geocoding is the secret ingredient in how carriers translate location
intelligence into business benefit. And the ability to analyze geocoded
elements of a network map is what unlocks that value...
(Click on the link above or scroll down for the full-length
feature)
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In the Spotlight
Observations on
GIS
By Dan O'Shea
March 15, 2007
This newsletter concludes Telephony's three-part series on
geographic information system (GIS) technology and its ongoing benefits
to telecommunications service providers. Here are a few parting
thoughts
from a few of the industry experts that have contributed their
knowledge
to the newsletter series...
(Click on the link above or scroll down to read more)
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Related Links
www.mmetrics.com
www.census.gov
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Feature
(Full-length)
Location nation
By Dan O'Shea
March 15, 2007
Geocoding is the secret ingredient in how carriers translate location
intelligence into business benefit.
We're all just numbers, addresses on grids of streets on the maps of
the
towns in which we live. Maybe it's disheartening to hear that, but it's
a simple fact of life anywhere in the world. And if we were not somehow
attached to physical locations with recorded addresses, we would
suddenly become very hard to find. No mail, no common utilities, no
sense of home.
If you're a hotel heiress or some other kind of magnificent scoundrel,
maybe you spend your life jetting off from place to place with no real
concept of home, but for the rest of us our homes are the centers of
our
lives, the great NOCs at the middle of the intersecting interests,
relationships, work, entertainment and private time that make up the
networks that are our lives.
That makes the technical means by which our homes can be visualized
extremely important to companies that provide services to us, telephone
companies among them. Without that capability, they wouldn't know if
their networks or services would reach us, and would have a hard time
figuring out whether our homes, neighborhoods, towns and cities are
even
viable markets for particular offerings.
As we've established in previous newsletters, network mapping solutions
using geographic information system technology are the primary tools
for
helping service providers make those determinations, but the real key
to
making that happen--the single aspect of those solutions that may have
the most intrinsic value--is geocoding. And the ability to analyze
geocoded elements of a network map is what unlocks that value.
"The analysis is what can help service providers plan their service
offerings in the most appropriate way," said John Jackson, vice
president, consulting and senior analyst at M:Metrics, an agency that
measures mobile content consumption. Jackson said the market for the
integration of mapping technology and intelligent analysis remains
fairly nascent but will increasingly become a part of most service
providers' service planning efforts over the next year or so.
Before that analysis comes the geocoding itself, the simple act of
assigning an address to some specific coordinates on a network map.
After that has been done, a lot of other information, including a
variety of demographic information, can be assigned to that geocoded
location. Much of the information can come from the U.S. Postal Service
or the U.S. Census Bureau and other resources, but telephone companies
that have been serving the same residential and business locations
throughout the years--often even as the names associated with those
locations have changed--also have a lot of their own information that
can be assigned.
"That's a fundamental place where all of this starts," said Chris
Cherry, director of communications industry strategy at MapInfo. "So
much of what we do is taking all the information, including the
information that the carrier has, and putting it in the map. The list
is
pretty long as far as where all this data is coming from. There are a
lot of different databases within the carrier organization where it
could be coming from."
In a general sense, one of the most common uses of geocoding is for
locating addresses of friends or businesses, according to Randall
Frantz, manager of telecommunications and LBS solutions at ESRI.
"Demographic information is normally attributed to a geographic area
such as a ZIP code or block groups/neighborhoods," he said. "When
demographic information is geocoded, it is assigned a point or map
location, but the point usually represents a wider area. Subdividing
the
ZIP code into more discrete and smaller areas such as neighborhoods can
provide greater details on the specific attributes of the population."
How all that information gets attached varies, but the process is
evolving to the point where a feed capability could be installed behind
the corporate firewall to allow the information to be imported to the
mapping system, MapInfo's Cherry said. The more complex the
information,
especially demographic information, the more obvious the need for
analytical capabilities. Being able to analyze the information and cut
it in different ways has tremendous advantages across many different
departments within a given telco organization.
Cherry and ESRI's Frantz both said the analysis is performed on a basic
level when telcos look to figure out how they should prioritize the
development of new broadband service areas. "You have to take [a good
look at] the information on your wire centers," Cherry said.
Frantz added, "Pulling in address information on homes passed within a
rate center, wire center or node activation area, and comparing against
demographic data can provide important insight on the revenue potential
for new services. If a company focuses only on the network cost and not
the revenue potential, it can easily miss its ROI target. Too often
companies base their forecasts on the aggregate ROI number when they
should take a much more focused look at local results. Some areas will
have higher take rates and revenues than others based strictly on their
demographics. Geocoding the customers helps identify which demographic
profile they fit."
By way of an example, Frantz said that looking at income patterns can
help in assessing purchasing habits. "A high-income area with an
average
household income of $100,000 next to a medium income area of $50,000
might deliver an average income for the combined area of $75,000. Yet,
if you were trying to sell telecommunication services and assumed that
the target income level for the combined area is $75,000 you would
probably miss the target for both groups."
Mapping companies often partner with companies that provide business
intelligence tools to provide flexible access to geocoded information
across a telco organization. Network engineering and service marketing
departments are obvious beneficiaries of geocoding analysis, but
customer service organizations and financial departments might use it,
too, Cherry said.
Geocoding is an active, ongoing process, and accuracy is critical so
that carriers have the right information to work with. People and
businesses move, and without frequent updates the geocoded information
can grow stale. Cherry said that it's surprising how often new street
names and addresses appear and old street names disappear or get
renamed. "Quarterly updates are really important," he said. "To know
where new developments are and have accurate information on that can be
something that's very important to your ability to reach new customers
beyond your existing customers."
Accuracy is a particular challenge in overseas markets, where maps and
street frameworks aren't quite the easy-to-understand grids that they
tend to be in most U.S. cities, and location information may not be as
easy to get and confirm. Mapping technology vendors are currently
pressing into those new markets.
"The use of geocoding is only starting to be understood within the
industry," Frantz said. "As more companies adopt geocoding we will see
many creative uses emerge. Unfortunately, companies are often not
willing to share their successes in using this technology because it
provides them with a definite competitive edge."
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In the Spotlight
(Full-length)
Observations on GIS
By Dan O'Shea
March 15, 2007
This newsletter concludes Telephony's three-part series on
geographic information system (GIS) technology and its ongoing benefits
to telecommunications service providers. Here are a few parting
thoughts
from a few of the industry experts that have contributed their
knowledge
to the newsletter series:
John Jackson, vice president, consulting and senior analyst at
M:Metrics, on the near future of integrating GIS and business
intelligence: This trend is sort of at the product assembly stage,
as you see companies like Navteq and MapInfo looking to directly
integrate more intelligence into their platforms. That's a goal for
them
that is a little ways out and something that is now a function of
partnerships and how they work with their customers.
Jim Steiner, senior director of Oracle Server Technologies, on the
importance of geocoding: Geocoding gives you one basic data set to
work with that has all kinds of information tied to it. You can enable
that data set to be shared in a variety of ways, and you could use the
same geocoded area in a local data set or a larger scope, like a
regional data set. The more you share these pieces of information, the
more important it is that the information is consistent and always
correct.
Michael Meyers, manager for broadband smart planning at Verizon
Communications: Prior to 2003, what most of the people in Verizon
were doing was working in a network maintenance mode. Since then, we
have been working on our FiOS project, and we have a need for accurate
information about our markets to know where the network facilities are
and where the customers are, but also to identify which customers have
a
propensity to buy.
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