Latest Contributions by SpatialNinja

Welcome back everybody to another episode of TGI5. In this week's episode, we're going to demonstrate how you can leverage Esri's demographic data with ArcGIS business analyst to help project scope and analyze underserved communities and help to address the digital divide. So without further ado, let's jump right into our demonstration. Understanding the digital divide and broadband availability is a geographic analysis problem. Where are the underserved communities and why? How do we better serve them as efficiently and effectively as possible? Those are the questions we'll look to answer in this demonstration as we start scoping out our broadband expansion projects. Now, all good analysis starts with good data. Esri offers a curated library of geographic data through the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World that can be used during the project scope and analysis phase of a network buildout and specifically to help understand where underserved communities exist, how many people are underserved and who these residents are. There are demographic data sets, broadband access and availability data sets, and data sets of the FCC Form 477 submission results. So using this geographic data with geographic analysis, let's see if we can understand the digital divide of the community of Lakeland Florida and then locate ideal community centers and schools to use as free public WiFi locations, or fixed wireless sites to offer a better broadband connection to the community's residence with ArcGIS, you can map any geographic data that you have as well as leverage the geographic data that as we curates. Here is the form 477 seven data set added to our map. The areas in Pink have a lower broadband score, which means based on the form 477 submission results. These are the areas with poor broadband speeds and few other options for Internet. So for this demo, these will be the areas we want to better serve. I'll also add to the map community centers, points of interest and schools that we may want to offer WiFi at, or even for a fixed wireless site deployment. Now that we have the data in our map, let's perform a 20 minutes walk time analysis for these sites, which will allow us to understand the neighborhood that will benefit from a WiFi hotspot. Will focus just on schools for today. So I'll Select the schools in the Lakeland Florida area and we'll create our 20 minutes walk time buffers. We can visually see the walk times and the neighborhoods within a 20 minutes walking distance. But let's actually use suitability analysis to prioritize these sites based on how underserved these neighborhoods are and how many residents we would actually be serving. Suitability analysis allows us to weight different variables to understand how suitable a location is for meeting a certain criteria, like addressing an underserved community. There are many different socioeconomic and demographic variables to choose from, but I've created a specific list for broadband accessibility. The variables that I've selected include the median, upload and download speeds, number of Internet service providers, total housing units, household income, and population growth. I've weighted upload and download speeds the highest, which means these variables will have the greatest influence on our suitability rankings. Now as we run this analysis, and then view the results. We have a final score for each school or target public WiFi location for how suitable that site is based on those weighted variables, we can always go back and change our variables or their weights if we decide to focus more on population growth and housing units, for example. Now that we have the rankings of sites in our suitability results, there is more than likely a project manager or team or city official who needs to make a final decision on which of these broadband projects to go ahead. With with ArcGIS, you can easily share analysis results through PDFs, Web Maps and dashboards. Just like this dashboard we see here, this dashboard allows me to select a prospective site and view its location on the map with other nearby telecom infrastructure. And also view an interactive infographic. We can explore the suitability analysis variables for each site, along with additional broadband accessibility variables to help us make a final decision on which sites to offer WiFi at. Whether it's specifically addressing digital divide, looking for areas to expand broadband into, prioritizing public WiFi locations, or locating sites for fixed wireless. The geographic data and geographic analysis tools offered by ArcGIS can assist in all of your broadband buildout project scoping and analysis. Thanks everybody for watching another episode of TGI5 and be on the lookout for future episodes in which we will cover additional ways that ArcGIS can help address the digital divide. So until next time we're out. - Patrick Huls ... View more

Hello once again and welcome to this week's episode of TGI5. In the episode today, we are going to take a look at a workflow around Churn prediction leveraging some tools within ArcGIS and spatial analysis to help us understand what customers may be likely to churn. So without further ado, let's jump into the demo. We're going to take a look at a newer tool in ArcGIS for assisting with Churn prediction. Now, ArcGIS offers hundreds of spatial and statistical tools, including a lot of those newer machine learning and prediction tool set. One of these tools is the Forest based classification and regression tool. So here's our scenario. I have a Customer 360 database with just over a million data points that were provided to us by every partner share tracker with some additional variables that we've generated internally, and we can see all those locations shown here in blue. Now this heat map on top shows us those customers that have cancel their service and turned within the last year. And what I want to better understand is why. And if we can understand why they left, then we can start to locate other current customers who have similar Churn characteristics and put together some marketing campaigns to influence their decision to stay well before they churn. So using this Customer 360 database, as well as the Forest based classification and regression tool, we ran this machine learning tool against a variety of different variables to see how they impact or influence the turning of customers. So some of those variables that we tested against were things like years as a customer, their total bill, or how much they spend on telecom services. Are there any competitive threats in the area? Do they have bundled services? How many devices at home do they have connected at once? What are the total number of reported technical issues? And we also took this data and we geoenriched it with some Esri demographic data. So we could also add additional demographic variables like the tapestry segmentation. And if we wanted to add an additional geographic variable like distance to central office, we could have also added that as well. Now, the results of the analysis produce a trained data set that lets us know all the different variables that influence Churn and how much they influenced Churn. So it produces a level of accuracy or a level of confidence that these variables actually did influence a customer to leave our organization. Now let's take a look at these results within a chart. So the top factors or variables that influence Churn were the total bill of a customer or how much they were spending the dominant Tapestry segmentation and how many times they reported technical issues. Now, if we like the level of confidence that the analysis had in these variables, we can then take this train data set and run it against our current customers in our Customer 360 database. This would then produce a result with a predicted probability that a customer is about to churn. Now, based on these analysis results, let's say we've implemented some campaigns to target those customers with a high probability of churning, and we want to monitor the impact of those campaigns. So what we've done is we have put together a dashboard to allow executive teams start to see how these campaigns are influencing Churn and look at our churn numbers month by month or year over year, so we can see for our entire service footprint how many customers have left this year versus last year, and then get a breakdown of how many of those customers disconnected their broadband or TV service. I can also drill down into a particular area and start to see the churn numbers for a region or a territory. Thank you all for watching the TGI5 episode this week. I hope this was insightful and you saw some ways to use the forest-based classification and spatial analysis tools within ArcGIS to help your organization understand churn and predict likelihood that a customer will cut their service. And until next time we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Welcome back to Telecom GIS in 5 Min. This week we discuss the ArcGIS identity-based security model. We talk about ArcGIS User Types, Member Roles, and Item Sharing.  These are the three tiers of security built into ArcGIS. Check out the links below for more info. trust.arcgis.com - https://trust.arcgis.com/en/ Content management best practices - https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/whitepaper/content-management-techniques-for-your-arcgis-enterprise-portal.pdf Until next time, we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Hey, everybody. And welcome back to TGI5. This week's episode, I wanted to walk through a new solution that we've been working on called the Walkout Survey Solution. This solution sets up maps and apps for your organization to be able to assign, track, and perform a Walkout survey. So let's jump in and show some of the applications that are parts of this Walkout survey solution. We'll first start with the Walkout Survey Center. This application is the main hub for your Walkout surveys. From within this main app, you can access the different tabs for the different parts of the Walkout survey workflow. The first tab here is the Manage tab, and this is really where we start to set up and manage all of our Walkout survey projects. So the first thing I want to do when setting up a new project is search for a location in which we want to perform our Walkout survey. So we have a new customer, this Oviedo mall that is requesting us to build out fiber services to them. So we're going to give this project a name and then start to digitize in just a general project boundary for this particular project. You'll notice that the status is automatically populated as 'proposed'. So we'll save this project. And now I want to sketch in a proposed route for this project and our fiber build out. And lastly, we'll put in a termination point for our fiber drop. So now that we have our project set up, I want to create a set of maps and layers that are specific to this project and share that with our field staff. So we'll open up our project creator. Now, this is using an ArcGIS notebook that will create views of our Walkout survey. It'll create specific layers for our field crews to go out and perform their walkout, as well as create a specific web map for them to use. Now, this notebook runs through a set of Python code, presents to me all of the projects that are in the proposed stage, and then allows me to create these project items. Now, if you've got multiple teams or multiple contractors working on different projects, this allows you to segment out your projects for those specific teams while still keeping one master set of maps and layers that house all of your projects and all of the assets and information collected during the Walkout survey. Now, as this process finishes up, we can then see the view layer as well as the map that were created for this project. And if we open up our project folder, I can then take these two items and share them with our field operations, Construction and provisioning team. So now that we've set up our project, let's jump back into the Walkout Survey Center, go to the assigned tab, and create a work order for one of our field teams to go out and perform this Walkout survey. We'll notice that the assigned tab launches into Workforce for RCIs directly embedded into the Walkout survey center. We'll search for our project, which takes us right to the location. Selecting on the project then allows me to create a new field survey assignments. We can assign it to our working field engineer, Tyler West, modify some of the priority information, and then create this assignment. So now that we've created this work force assignment, let's jump into our Workforce mobile application and start performing our walkout survey. So the next steps in the workflow are to perform our field work. Here on my tablet, I have access to the Workforce mobile application, which provides me with access to all of my work orders. Here is our field survey that needs to be performed, and from here we can start this assignment. This lets those in the back office know that we have started our work. Now let's jump into field maps where we can search for the field map that has been created for our walk out survey. This opens up our field map map where I've got access to the project information and our proposed route. And from here, we can start to collect assets during our walk out. So if we want to Mark off where there is a pedestal, we'll drop that point on the map. We can add attachments if we want, and then we can submit that record. Now, we want to take this asset, this particular feature, and we want to add it to our project. This then creates a relationship and an Association between this particular asset and that project. So the next time we have projects in this area, we can see all of the previous assets that were collected during the walkout. So instead of recapturing poll locations, cabinets, and pedestal locations, we can just reuse any of these features that we have collected on any one of our walkouts. Now, I'll go ahead and just collect one more asset, and this will be a distribution poll. We can also Mark whether or not there are any violations on this particular poll. So if we do see a poll or joint used violation, we can add that note to our poll record and then submit that. And then again, I want to associate this particular record to this project. And once we have performed our walkout survey, we can jump back into work force and we can Mark our work order as completed. Now, let's jump back into the office to show how we can monitor the status of all of these walkout survey projects. Now, back in the Walkout survey center under the Manage tab, here is our existing project footprint, and now we can see some of the features that have been collected during our walk out survey. If we want to update the status of this overall project, we can select our project and then change the status of not only the project, but also all of the assets that were collected during the actual walkout. And finally, within the Walkout survey center, there is a monitor tab that has a dashboard embedded for tracking the status of all of our Walkout surveys. We can see the project listed here on the right hand side, and we can select our project, Zoom right to it, and start to see how many poles were collected during that walk out, if any of them have a violation, and the type of poll that was collected and any other general assets that were also collected during the walkout. We also get a summary view of the total footage of fiber that is being used within this proposed project. If we want to track the actual work orders, we can then open up our assignment details and assignment stats tabs and start to see the actual work orders that are taking place for these walkouts as well. And so this has been a quick review of the Walkout survey solution that we've been working on. Please feel free to provide us some feedback and insights. And if you are interested in accessing this solution, just let us know. And until next time, we're out.   - Patrick Huls ... View more

Welcome back to Telecom GIS in five minutes. As we're continuing our push on the NexGen network management, we realized there are all kinds of users out there looking for a solution that could revolutionize their current data management method. And they're not just telecom builders and operators. These conversations were happening with other electric, gas and other utility companies, local and regional government and transportation authorities and many, many other use cases. I want to use today as an opportunity to show you how we can start managing both utilities and communication systems, all on one single pane of glass. In order to do that, I am leveraging the latest and greatest utility network management, in ArcGIS. This provide a comprehensive framework of functionality for modeling utility systems such as electric and telecommunications, all at the same time. And check this out. We have electric system on the bottom of the map and some sample telecom system on the top, which both are riding on the same utility network database. And with the utility network, we have built in thousands of business rules to ensure data integrity and secure a functional network topology. It is designed to model all the components within your systems. And let's take a quick look at one of those cross section where we have both electric and telecommunication elements going through the same route. Let's go through a network trace exercise to identify some ducts. We have space availabilities for new cables. I will start by placing the trace starting point at the end point on two of the knockout features. Simply use this selection tool to select those two features and add them as trace locations within the utility network ribbon. And now let's kind of zoom out a little bit so we can see the full picture. Now, within the utility network, trace tools simply select the shortest path tracing and by adding a couple trace parameters to limit the trace to available ducts within the banks. Now, we could get a return of results on all the related structures and all the available ducts that has enough space for new cables. Now, let's zoom back in to one of the cross section and we're going to select one of the top bank. Just from this selection itself, you could clearly see there's electric line and also a communication line going through the same area. And now let's expand that duct bank and look at all the details. You can see the first two ducts within the duct bank occupied by either of the lines. And to do all this ArcGIS utility network management is the foundational technology based on a next generation Enterprise GIS. Is designed to meet the evolving needs of utilities and telecommunication, as well as to serve planning and engineering workflows and also operation and maintenance activities. And as a quick summary, you could easily use our pre-configured editor templates to execute any kind of designs for electric system and communications system all at the same time. We all living in one large connected world with cross domain infrastructure systems, and GIS is the platform that could support all aspects of these next generation digital infrastructure all together. Until the next time we out.   ... View more

Hey, everyone, and welcome to telecom GIS in five minutes. Last week, we showcased how you could reimagine network high level design using different types of geospatial information models to create a digital twin. And in this week's episode, we want to look at how to reimagine executive insight with digital twins. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. For this demonstration, I wanted to highlight and showcase a digital twin viewer application that is geared towards executives and management teams who are looking for that single pane of glass into their business Here in this application, we can easily see our entire network footprint within our main map view. And in this application, we have different report layers that we can toggle on and off to give us a better sense of what is going on in our business. Here's a sales report layer that gives us a breakdown of the number of opportunities we have within this area and our total potential revenue. On the right hand side, we've got charts and summaries that allow us to see a breakdown of the top performing areas for sales revenue. Selecting each of these areas highlights and filters them within our interactive map view. Now we've got report layers for churn as well as our NPS score and outages that may be going on within our network. Now, not only do we have these executive report layers, but we can get summaries of our network; like our total subscribers, total length of fiber plant' and the total number of wireless 5G sites within our entire footprint. Now, along with focusing on this top level view, we can dive into a specific market or region, like our Orlando market. As soon as we get in close to the Orlando market, we start to see some of our network assets, like our fiber routes, as well as our central office and wireless site locations. And we can see that the charts and summaries on the right hand side are updating based on what we see within our map. Now, let's jump in closer to the downtown Orlando area. Here's where we start to see our 3D reality capture view of our digital twin. Not only do we have our 3D view, but we can bring up a 2D map and have these two views side by side. Now, these 3D buildings aren't just a pretty picture, but we can interact with these 3D objects. Selecting on this building highlights it on our 2D map and brings up additional information about this building, like the address, the total number of businesses within this building, how many employees those businesses have, and information on how much those businesses are spending on communication services today. If we want a further breakdown of the businesses within this building, we can see that in a tabular view. Here are all of those businesses within this one building, the total employees, how much they're spending on communication services, as well as additional information. Now, we've got this information for all of the buildings within the Orlando area, and we can select on another building and see additional information about that location. Not only do we have our business prospect and customer information in this viewer, but we've got our network and asset information. Here is a wireless 5G site that's going up and we can see all of that attribute information on that particular asset. Now, this digital twin viewer allows us to bring in your business data, but also Esri demographic data here is a layer for population and selecting on the census block then shows us the total population in this area. And on the right hand side, we've got charts and summaries that also give us a breakdown of this information. Along with the demographic data we can pull in other layers like this Form 477 layer. That gives us a sense of what the broadband availability is in this particular area, as well as provides us with competitive intelligence on other broadband providers within this area. And we've also configured charts and summaries to show us this information as well, the average number of service providers and that upload and download speed within this area. So in this demonstration, we have showcased this digital twin viewer, for executive and management teams to have that single pane of glass, allowing them to get their executive reports and then drill down into different markets to see additional asset information and business prospect and sales information all within a single holistic view. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in this week to another episode of telecom GIS in five minutes and until next time we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

With hurricane season upon us, I wanted to share a simple but powerful python script which locates assets that are in the path of a major storm.  The script leverages the ArcGIS Python API and ArcGIS Notebooks which means it can be run manually or automatically using tasks, which I'll cover in the video.  The script also requires that your asset locations are in a feature layer within your GIS portal, along with a polygon feature layer used as a storm track or warning, and a layer to add your alarms or vulnerable assets to. Enjoy this week's episode. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Hello everyone and welcome back to TGI5. Today's episode is going to cover sector mapping within ArcGIS. Now sector mapping is the process of creating a visualization for the cell sectors on a cell site antenna. And within ArcGIS Pro, there is a tool that allows you to create these cells sector visuals from a spreadsheet, or a feature class, or shapefile that you have that contains the information about those cells sectors. So, let's Jump Right In and show how we can run this tool with in ArcGIS Pro. So the first thing that I want to do is add a spreadsheet of those antennas. So, here is that table, and we'll go ahead and open up the attribute table. We can see what is within this spreadsheet. Now, the schema that we see here is coming directly from our Communications Data Management for ArcGIS Enterprise data model, and we've just populated this with some antenna information. So we can see information on the antenna like the Site ID, the Sector Number, the frequency or the band for that particular antenna, as well as the lat/long of the actual cell site. Now, under the geoprocessing panel, if we do a search, or we go to the crime analysis and safety tools Toolbox will notice this cell site records to feature class tool. This is the tool that we will use to generate those cell site sector visuals. So we'll choose our antennas table. And then we'll decide where to save the output feature class. Now, there are two layers that get created. There is a antenna sites layer, so it will create a point feature class for the actual cell site. And then there is a an antenna sector feature class that will contain the polygon visual for the sectors. Then within this tool will need to fill out some additional information. Like the Site ID field, as well as the Sector ID field within our spreadsheet, will fill out the lat and long fields so that we can geocode and plot the cell site locations. As well as some important fields here, like the Azimuth field and we can always set a default if we don't have the Azimuth in our data, we need to fill out the beamwidth field and we can choose if it's a full beamwidth, or a halfbeam width, and then finally, the radius field. So these are all fields that have been pre-populated in our spreadsheet and as we run this tool, it will actually create those cell site locations as well as that sector visual. Now as this tool finishes up will start to see the cell site locations, draw on the map and over in our table of contents. We also see the site and sector layers, so let's open up our Antenna sites layer here and just take a look at the attribution that is a part of this layer. So, all of those input parameters that we filled out in the tool, get populated into fields here and then it brings over some information from our original spreadsheet. And if we open up the sectors table, same thing, the input parameters get carried over as well as that attribute information from our original antenna spreadsheet. Now let's zoom in on this data a little bit closer. We zoom into our cell sites and now we start to see those sector visual polygons. We'll select one of them here and then we'll take a look at the attributes for this particular sector. So as we can see, this geoprocessing tool within ArcGIS Pro very quickly created our cell site sector visuals from that original spreadsheet. Now, if you would like to test this out, this is a part of ArcGIS Pro 2.7 or later. And you'll be able to access that geoprocessing tool. And if you've got a spreadsheet with that cell sector or antenna information you can bring that right in and line up your fields as you configure the tool and run it. This has been another episode of TGI5, thank you all for joining us and we'll see you next time. -Patrick Huls ... View more

  Coverage analysis in ArcGIS can provide your organization with better insight into your coverage footprint. To learn more about coverage processing and additional ArcGIS wireless solutions, check out these two story maps.  Coverage Processing and Mapping with ArcGIS - https://arcg.is/1DyTrS Esri's Wireless Coverage Solutions - https://arcg.is/XCrr Until next time, we out. - Patrick Huls ... View more

For this episode of TGI5, we wanted to walk through an interesting drop/bury use case for ArcGIS QuickCapture.  With ArcGIS QuickCapture we can quickly collect the location of fiber drop so those returning to bury the drop can locate it, and management in the back office can track the status of the drop/bury. Feel free to reply to this video with any questions or comments. Until next time, we out. -Patrick Huls ... View more