Look at the site list before you talk about a refarm

A refarm meeting likes to begin with spectrum charts. The work that actually decides whether those charts mean anything is a site list that still matches the live layer.

Georgian networks accumulate names. A cabinet is swapped and the planning sheet keeps the old CGI for a season. A microwave hop still carries a 2G label in the transmission inventory while the radio side has been 4G for two years. Drive-test files from a contractor use yet a third naming scheme. If you hang a predicted coverage plot on that mess, you will move energy to a rooftop that no longer transmits and ignore the one that does.

On intake we ask for the list with CGI or the local equivalent, the hop inventory, and a sentence about which names the NOC actually uses on a trouble ticket. When those three disagree — and they often do — the study pauses. Inventing a join so the first map can go out on Friday is how you earn a briefing in which the planning lead says, correctly, “that cell is not ours.”

This is dull. It is also cheaper than a refarm argument that has to be unwound in the room. If your list is older than a year, say so on the request. We will put reconciliation in the calendar instead of pretending a dual-layer reading can start on Monday.

The radio-access study includes this week. A backhaul review that skips it will blame hops that were renamed, which is a different kind of fiction from blaming the radio for a full pipe. Either fiction wastes the sitting.