Connectivity analysis for councils and government bodies

Carrier coverage maps are polygons drawn over terrain. A grant assessor wants to know which houses, which farms, which road and which school have no usable service — and how many people that is. A shaded polygon can’t answer that, and neither can a resident survey with forty responses.

Councils endorsing projects under the Regional Connectivity Program, or making the case for a Mobile Black Spot Program site, are asked for place-based evidence: where the gap is, who it affects, and why this location over the next one. Producing that from scratch is weeks of GIS work most councils don’t have spare.

Regional Connectivity Program Round 3 is funding place-based broadband and mobile solutions, with councils endorsing projects as local priorities. The Mobile Black Spot Program has funded over 1,200 base stations across seven rounds, each one argued for with evidence.

Maptino Connectivity produces that evidence in the form assessors expect: a defensible, repeatable, whole-of-LGA view, with the methodology documented so it holds up to scrutiny.

Every council can make a case for its own black spots. A state program office has to rank them against each other, and the evidence arrives in sixty different formats, from sixty different methods, none of them comparable. The usual result is a prioritisation that can’t be defended when the council that missed out asks why.

Maptino Connectivity scores every premises in the state on the same 0–100 scale, from the same data, with the same documented method. Two towns three hundred kilometres apart can be compared honestly. Weightings — severity, scale, coverage type, service criticality — are tunable to the program’s own criteria, and the ranking re-runs live when they change.

The same tool that helps a council build an application helps an assessor test one. Overlay the applicant’s claimed gap against each carrier’s published footprint and against measured drive-test data; see the premises count behind the claim; check whether the proposed site closes the gap or just moves it. Independent of any carrier, and independent of the applicant.

Maptino also works alongside program offices, applicants and their advisers directly. For a department or agency, that means assessment support — an independent read of the evidence behind each application, on one method, across a whole round. For a council, regional development body or any government entity preparing a submission, it means the analysis, maps and written methodology produced with them, by an engineer who has built the evidence base before. Consultancies and advisers acting for a government client can commission the same work under their own engagement. Tool licence or delivered service — see Services.

The scoring doesn’t change with the boundary, and neither does the audience. The same premises-level method reports at national, state and LGA level, and keeps going below the LGA — to postcode and down to SA1, the finest statistical area the ABS publishes — or against another defined area of interest such as a corridor, a program footprint or a region. A federal assessor comparing applications from three states, a state program office ranking sixty councils, a regional development body making its case, and the consultancy advising any of them are looking at the same numbers, computed the same way, so results carry across programs and across rounds without being rebuilt for each one.

Coverage is the input; the decisions are about service. The same premises-level data answers where emergency warnings won’t reach, which highway stretches have no service for a breakdown call, and which communities can’t sustain telehealth or remote learning — as layers, with the count of people behind each one.

Where a modelled gap is contested — by a carrier, an applicant or a member — Maptino’s drive-test tools produce measured signal from a standard Android phone and a report that stands on its own. Modelled and measured, one workflow. See Drive Test and Desktop Analysis.

Runs on infrastructure Maptino operates in Australia — Akamai Cloud (Linode), Sydney region. Data held there stays onshore and is not replicated offshore. The provider holds ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 attestations at the infrastructure level; Maptino itself holds no security certification, and does not claim one. Where a program requires a specific hosting standard, the deployment can be moved to infrastructure that meets it.

Deployed across 1.6 million premises and 11 local government areas in a single deployment, resolving to individual properties.