How Many PH Barangays without Cellsite?

3 min readFeb 16, 2021

The short answer is: 36,607 out of 42,055 barangays don’t have cellsites. This is around 87% of barangays in the Philippines. This is another proof of the failure of RA7925. Our legislators need to take out Section 11 provision that prohibits ISPs from owning their infrastructure.

Here is how I measured these.

We export the data from ProjectBASS.org using Tableau software tool. We include those cell sites that have NO data as to their Cellsite ID.

Using the /worksheet/copy/crosstab, we then export this into Microsoft Excel and then export it out as CSV file. We then import this CSV file into QGIS. There were 32,484 rows in the export.

2. We then take this CSV and Import into QGIS as follows:

The QGIS canvass will then show all the Cellsites detected by ProjectBASS as below:

3. Create Spatial Index of this file. This accelerates the complex polygon operation we will be doing in later steps.

4. We then add the barangays and their outlines (polygons) into the QGIS canvas. This vector layer is copied from PHILGIS’ Barangays 2016.

After we add this vector layer, our map should now look like this:

5. We then initiate a vector computation. This is the “Count Points in Polygon” to see how many cellsites are located inside each barangay’s polygon:

Open the [Count] Data Attribute and examine the contents. We now note that there is a new field called NUMPOINTS that hold the number of cellsites inside each barangay: