What Makes Geospatial Data Unique for Expanding Telco Infrastructure?

A Conversation With Joe Francica

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Joe Francica:

Infrastructure projects inclusive of building roads, bridges, cell towers, they’re always going to have to be placed somewhere. And for that you need really accurate and current geospatial data. The first thing most people ask is, where’s it going to go? And location intelligence answers the “where” questions.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Welcome back to Core Conversations: A CoreLogic Podcast, where we tour the property market to investigate how economics, climate change, governmental policies, and technology affect everyday life.

I am your host, Maiclaire Bolton Smith, and I’m just as curious as you are about everything that happens in our industry. As everyone is needing more and more bandwidth, 5G is poised to revolutionize our world, but only if telecommunications technology can make it possible. Supporting this technology requires a lot of expensive infrastructure investment. It’s no surprise that companies need information on what developers are going to build and where, and they want this information before anything actually happens.

The problem is, the data is decentralized, so it can be difficult in finding those signs of growth. At least that was the case before aggregated geospatial location intelligence was widely available. So to talk about how telecommunication companies can tap into geospatial data and what that means for the future of 5G networks, we have Joe Francica, expert in location intelligence and geospatial data. Joe, welcome to Core Conversations.

JF:

Hey, Maiclaire great to be on Core Conversations for the first time.

MBS:

All right, and I’m sure it won’t be your last. Can we just start and kick things off by explaining, what do we actually mean by location intelligence and geospatial data?

Erika Stanley:

Before we get into how telecommunication companies can use location intelligence to expand, I wanted to remind our listeners that we want to help you keep pace with the property market. To make it easy, we curate the latest insight and analysis for you on our social media where you can find us using the handle @CoreLogic on Facebook and LinkedIn, or @CoreLogicInc on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram. But now, let’s get back to Maiclaire and Joe.

JF:

Sure. Let’s separate the two terms because they’re often used interchangeably. Location intelligence in the broader sense of the term is inclusive of the management, analytics, and visualization of location-based data, also known as geospatial data. And geospatial data always has a geographic reference such as a latitude and longitude. So that’s it in basic terms.

MBS:

Okay. Okay, that makes sense. How dramatically can this type of data actually improve, if we look at forecasting for companies that are looking to plan for large infrastructure projects and things where they’d need to know?

JF:

Infrastructure projects inclusive of building roads, bridges, cell towers, they’re always going to have to be placed somewhere. And for that you need really accurate and current geospatial data. The first thing most people ask is, where’s it going to go? And location intelligence answers the “where” questions. The questions we’re really trying to answer with our growth product is to narrow the choice of areas to the most optimal locations, given the availability of land and proximity to other regional developments, and increasing population. To do so, this is where we use a series of facts about the area that identified land that is in transition from things like an open space or vacant land, for example, to either commercial or residential development.

MBS:

Okay. And when we talk about these different types of data, are they used in independently of each other, or do they build upon each other?

JF:

Yeah, they really do build upon each other. This is our indicators, these factual elements. Let me take an example. Suppose Farmer Jones is selling some of their property that is currently used for corn and zoned for agricultural. Well, they sell the property to Smith Real Estate Development Corporation, who is looking to change the land use to make it into a residential development. We at CoreLogic will capture this change in land use based on data we receive from county governments, and we’ll capture who also buys it. These two events alone, these indicators or signals, if you will, where land use change has been recognized and a change of ownership has occurred. Now that’s the factual information that we know about the land and that is related to future land in development, and probably residential housing.

MBS:

Okay. Now, if we look at the telecommunications or telco industry, a big topic right now is 5G. And it really is because I know everybody is trying to provide connectivity for everything from core networks to self-driving cars and wearables. It’s just the industry has just exploded over the last few years. In order for all of that to exist though, the infrastructure needs to be there to support it. Can you talk a little bit about how expansion of 5G networks is really building and how just the industry is evolving?

JF:

Let’s look at the existing landscape for broadband. Telecommunication companies build infrastructure where there will be an increasing number of subscribers, so wireless, cable, those folks who are subscribing to services. They will build where there are higher populations, which continues to be in the larger growth areas. Now, the shift in growth post-pandemic has moved towards the suburbs and exurbs, and, therefore, increase the strain on broadband providers to improve their networks to account for this data and additional streaming traffic. This is where our growth solutions offers a significant advantage. So we’re giving them this early-alert solution about where growth is or will be forthcoming.

MBS:

I guess if we look at different requirements that supports different types of infrastructure, there’s so many different things out there, and self-driving cars are huge right now, video streaming. If we’re looking at just the average home versus maybe something on the industrial side of things, what types of requirements are required, and is it the same for something on a residential property versus something bigger?

JF:

Yeah, there’s a couple things. The pace of development is really increasing, and that’s only going to continue. There’s going to be demand for connected devices to communicate seamlessly. It could be between cars, could be other sensors, the old term Internet of Things. It’s going to increase in streaming to homes and to mobile devices and putting an enormous demand for additional data volume. Whether you’re looking to site new cell towers or increasing existing broadband capacity, you need really good reliable location-based data to make those decisions.

MBS:

Sure, yeah. Because we live in a time that 10 years ago people didn’t have smart homes, and now everybody has some sort of smart technology in their home, if not an entire smart home and a smart car, and all these different things that are requiring more bandwidth.

JF:

That’s right, yes. You want your refrigerator to talk to you and tell you that you need more milk. It’s really gotten to an interesting stage.

MBS:

Exactly. When we get to the stage that your refrigerator will tell your car to go to the grocery store and get it for you.

JF:

There we go.

MBS:

We are in that era of smart technology that is requiring more and more bandwidth. And something too that… I mean, everyone gets upset when it doesn’t work and when you don’t have enough bandwidth to support your own home, let alone maybe some really big technological advances, it can’t fail in this day and age.

JF:

And that goes back to the issue of you need more infrastructure to handle the data volumes and the mobile data that we all use on a day-to-day basis.

MBS:

Yeah. I want to talk more about the infrastructure, actually, because I think that’s an important topic. I guess too, if we’re looking at, you talked a little bit about everything is moving into these further out from urban areas, there’s a lot of expansion going on. I guess when we’re looking at requirements to support hardware for this different mobile technology, the location intelligence data would be really important to understand where urban developments are happening and where some of the future growth may be happening. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JF:

Yeah. We want to be able to pick up certain signals, as I mentioned before, about where this growth could occur. We look at whether the county has changed the land use designation. Perhaps it was once solely commercial real estate, well now it’s changed to mixed-use retail. You see that happening all the time. Malls are going down and they’re putting up mixed-used residential and retail. This is really not uncommon that we see this happening in the post-pandemic era where office buildings that once set idle are now being redeveloped for alternative uses.

MBS:

Yeah. Are there any particular regions that we’re seeing this especially high bandwidth demand, and maybe different than there had been previously because of such things like a lot of commercial real estate just sitting open in big cities?

JF:

Yeah. Well, this is where our growth solution really helps to answer that kind of a question. What we’re trying to do is the solution will not only identify the counties or the metros that are growing fast, but since the solution is property based, we have the geographic precision to narrow the specific growth areas to neighborhoods. It’s really much like finding this needle in the haystack. If you’re a major telecommunications company and you’ve got the whole country to look at, and they say, “Well, where are we going to go next? Where are we going to put up a cell tower?” What are you going to do? You’ve got to have something to narrow the choices.

ES:

It’s that time again, grab a cup of coffee or your favorite beverage, we’re going to do the numbers in the housing market. Here’s what you need to know.

U.S. home prices remain resilient despite surging borrowing costs and historic housing supply shortages. In 2023, home prices increased by 2.4% compared with 2022. However, this growth is slower than prior years. Between 2014 and 2019, home price growth averaged 5.2%. Nevertheless, both the CoreLogic S&P Case-Shiller Index and the CoreLogic Home Price Index showed continued signs of growth.

Home prices are up 6.1% from the lowest point seen in January 2023. The HPI forecast that home prices will increase by another 3% on average in 2024. While 2023 saw a considerably slower rate of appreciation than 2022, areas in the South and Midwest continue to outpace the national average. Miami had the highest appreciating U.S. housing market in 2023. Although the Northwest recorded declines for the year, recent strength in that region suggests that home prices will bounce back in 2024. And that’s The Sip. See you next time.

MBS:

I guess when you said, “Where are the cell towers going to be, how do we narrow this down?” There’s always been this assumed need for dedicated capacity, but cloud technology is taking over in various industries. Is that something that potentially could come into play here?

JF:

Well, something’s got to hold the data volumes. Everybody’s looking to cloud for more storage. And some of the processing obviously is being done in very large data centers, but some of the analytics are being done at the edge. So all of the sensors that are capturing this data, some of it’s being processed at the edge, some of it’s being taken into data centers. And this is where the real processing and analytics begins to occur, and you need a cloud-“native infrastructure to be able to do that.

MBS:

Okay. Okay. No, that makes sense. If we go back to, and looking at potential areas that are up and coming that are going to need more 5G infrastructure, what would be the first step, or how would somebody approach defining a target area?

JF:

Yeah. What we try to do are… Again, I’ll go back to what we’re capturing is some of the signals and what we call the leading indicators of that change. And some are essentially lagging indicators. The leading indicators are those where we see a change in land use or ownership. And the lagging indicators are those that capture areas where new building permits are being issued for where there has been new construction maybe within the last two years. And how many of these transitions are we capturing in close proximity to the others? And proximity is key here.

Because if you see only a single piece of property going up, well that’s okay. But if you see others going up in proximity to each other, maybe as close as the next block or maybe even two miles away, we put a model on that to be able to judge and approximate that this area is likely to grow. We have the ability to determine the ability to narrow those choices, and this is what our data solution provides.

ES:

To learn more about growth areas, make sure to follow our CoreLogic economic updates. You can find episodes on home prices in the US on our podcast, or you can visit “corelogic.com/intelligence.”

MBS:

You trigger another thought. And I think one thing when everybody thinks of telecommunications data, they know that it’s a highly regulated industry, and there’s always a lot of things to be concerned with compliance in particular. Can location intelligence help with this in any way?

JF:

Where we support regulatory compliance is in helping broadband providers with our tax boundary data, as well as providing them a complete parcel fabric, an overlay to areas in which they operate and they need to provide this information to government authorities.

MBS:

Okay. Joe, you used a very interesting term, “parcel fabric.” Can you just tell us what you mean by that?

JF:

Right. CoreLogic has a set of parcels that cover the entire country, about 157 million plus parcels. It’s a dataset, it’s got geometry. And if you put that all over the country, it looks like a fabric. So you’re essentially covering the whole area with a set of parcels, or properties really, the other word we use is a property. And if you cover the U.S. and you look at it on a map, it looks like a fabric.

MBS:

I like that. Compliance is something that is… You can’t get away from it, it’s always going to be there. And having any way to be able to help facilitate any compliance issues in deep regulatory environments like telecommunication definitely can be useful.

JF:

Yeah, yeah, to be sure. And again, what we try to provide to them is layers of data, of baseline data to make sure that they are in compliance. And so tax is one of them, and some of our growth product is another.

MBS:

Yeah. No, absolutely. I know there’s some reports out there that question whether investment in 5G infrastructure will pay off. This is a massive investment. Would you say that using location intelligence is maybe a way to help it pay off in the long run? Or, what are your thoughts on that?

JF:

Yeah. Telecommunications in general is a location-based business, so investing in location-based data can only help them succeed. You can’t identify the location of where these shifts are taking place, the shifts in population, this is where location intelligence comes into play. You can’t identify new growth areas, as we’ve been discussing, without geospatial data. You just can’t support the need for broadband expansion into rural areas, which is a really big topic, without seeing the areas selected by the government on a map. That’s one way. And then understanding where your existing infrastructure lies in relation to that.

MBS:

Yeah. Why is rural infrastructure a big deal?

JF:

The government has designated a certain pot of money that which there is underserved communities with broadband. If you look at, again, a map of the U.S. The big cities, they have good infrastructure for handling broadband, not so much in the rural area. So they’ve designated a pot of money so that infrastructure can be built out and serve those communities, especially schools that don’t have broadband access, that need broadband access. Again, we’re leveling up the educational capabilities of all students, especially those in rural communities.

MBS:

Got it. Wow, that’s important.

ES:

Before we end this episode, let’s take a break and talk about what’s happening in the world of natural disasters. CoreLogic’s Hazard HQ Command Central reports on natural catastrophes and extreme weather events across the world. A link to their coverage is in the show notes.

2024 started on unsteady footing when a magnitude 7.5 earthquake rocked Japan’s Noto Peninsula, causing widespread damage. Insured loss estimates are between $1 billion and $5 billion. Then the wind storms rolled in. January brought winter storm Finn to the southeastern U.S. CoreLogic estimated that 26,617 single- and multifamily homes were potentially impacted by tornadic winds in Florida, southeastern Alabama, and southwestern Georgia.

Only days later, storm Ingunn slammed into Norway’s west coast, causing widespread disruption to transportation infrastructure across Norway. The affected areas were sparsely populated and had limited commercial activity, so insured loss from this event is not expected to be high.

In California, flooding from atmospheric rivers returned for the second year in a row. Officials declared a state of emergency in eight California counties, with evacuations in some areas. Hundreds of thousands of homes in California were at considerable risk of life-threatening flooding. At the time of this recording, the storms were still ongoing.

MBS:

You trigger a thought. And I guess just to wrap up today, leading indicators on different growth areas and where we think populations may expand, we’ve talked about this in the capacity of the telecommunications industry, but there’s got to be applicability to this, to other industries. Do you have any thoughts on where this type of location intelligence data might be applicable elsewhere?

JF:

Yes. The same thing applies for what we’re doing with telecommunications companies as with any industry. I haven’t heard any company CEO ever say that they didn’t want to grow. Right? Yet, whether you’re expanding the number of franchises of your favorite coffee shop or you big box retailer, or wanting to get ahead by laying new gas pipelines to feed manufacturing or residential areas, it seems most all want to know where to locate something. This is the value in becoming a more location-intelligent company.

MBS:

Wow. Yeah, and being a more location-intelligent world I think is where we are going.

JF:

Right.

MBS:

Awesome. All right, well, thank you Joe. Thanks so much for joining me today on Core Conversations: A CoreLogic Podcast.

JF:

Great, Maiclaire, great to be with you. Thank you so much.

MBS:

All right. And thank you for listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed our latest episode. Please remember to leave us a review and let us know your thoughts, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast to be notified when new episodes are released. And thanks to the team for helping bring this podcast to life: producer, Jessi Devenyns; editor and sound engineer, Romie Aromin; our facts guru, Erica Stanley; and social media duo, Sarah Buck and Makaila Brooks. Tune in next time for another Core Conversation.

ES:

You still there? Well, thanks for sticking around. Are you curious to know a little bit more about our guest today? Joe Francica brings over 40 years of experience in location intelligence and geospatial information technology with the purpose of providing clients the unique value proposition afforded by location-based software and data to applications in retail, insurance, banking, telecommunications, and real estate. Joe has worked for large multinational companies as well as startups, and is now a principal on the location intelligence product team at CoreLogic. He holds degrees from Rutgers, Dartmouth, and Southern Methodist University.

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