The Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit offers a suite of capabilities for estimating fiber deployment costs based on road distances. It also allows the user to select and export total road distances and costs (spreadsheet) and GIS road segments to be used as inputs by a fiber design team. A user can export all roads within an area or specific road segments.
The Toolkit seeks to bridge the divide between strategic planning and implementation, compressing the timeframe between identifying a business opportunity and initiating a high-probability-of-success engineering design effort.
The Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit can be used in combination with the Fiber Strategy Toolkit (for a detailed analysis of existing fiber networks) and/or the National Hex Toolkit (for an analysis of all broadband networks: fiber, cable, DSL, and licensed fixed wireless, including demographic and other layers). Those who do not need road segment level data might consider the Fiber Strategy Toolkit Pro, in place of the Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit. The former includes road distances, summed by hexagon, but not exportable GIS road segments.
The Fiber Pre-Engineering Toolkit exploits the FCC's new hexagonal (H3) framework. The Toolkit includes essential planning data on a hexagon level, based on the Fabric v3 framework:
- Populated areas by level 8 hexagon
- Unpopulated areas
- Locations and units (a.k.a. homes passed) per level 8 hexagon
- Roads, state and county boundaries, cities and town names, a selection of streamed base maps, and other references.
The FCC recently released a Broadband Funding Map. The Toolkit incorporates this new FCC data, showing unserved and underserved locations that are also unfunded, per level 8 hexagon.
The Toolkit allows the user to explore all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia at a hexagon level. The hexagonal grid enables exceptionally high resolution in rural areas (example).
The road database is limited to one region (Map | Midwest, Northeast, South, or West) of the US. Those requiring multiple regions can enter the discount code “MoreRoads” for an 40% discount on additional regions, purchased at the same time.
Take a few minutes to read the Introduction, the Getting Started Guide and the site License Agreement.
Some of the secondary data sets are available only for the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, but not for Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Important: GIS software is demanding. This software requires a relatively new fully-configured computer (RAM, processor speed, SSD, etc.) to fully leverage its capabilities.
This product is delivered via a digital download.
