Bridging the Geographic Gap: Adapting Spectrum Licensing to Census Boundaries

As the Census 2025 estimated population data is released we are reminded of the challenges of matching the Census data roll up areas (typically counties) with the FCC licenses areas which are also typically counties.  For this discussion we are going to focus two states which exhibit the two types of changes we typically have to evaluation.

Simplest Case - Census Area Splits or is Renamed

Our example in this case are the county group in Alaska.  Recently, Wade Hampton was renamed to Kusilvak and it received a new government FIPS code for Census purposes.  In this case the license area will continue to be identified as Wade Hampton in the FCC market lists but we associate these license areas with Kusilvak for population counts.

The next example from Alaska is a case where the county is effectively split into two different counties.  In this example, the Valdez-Cordova county was split into Chugach and Copper River counties, both with new government FIPs codes.  In this case, the FCC maintains the licenses area as Valdez-Cordova, but we have applied the Valdez-Cordova licenses to both the Chugach and Copper River counties.  In the first image below, the previous Alaska county boundaries are shown followed by the current Alaska county boundaries with Wade Hampton renamed and Valdez-Cordova split.  Lastly, there is a table highlighting the Current Counties names and the Previous County names.

Complex Case - Census Area Splits or is Renamed

In this case, the census roll ups map to a region that doesn't correlate to the FCC license areas, in fact the census roll ups map to multiple FCC license areas.  The example for this case is Connecticut's shift from Counties to Planning Areas.  In the map below the black boundaries represent the Planning Areas and the and the color shades represent the FCC county license areas.  In this case, we will continue to use the county names to represent the licenses for each area, but we are providing a cross reference below where you can look up the planning regions and municipality to see which county license information you should read.