How to Research an E-Rate Provider: SPIN Lookup, Funding History, and Win Rate

2026-06-30 · 11 min read · By FRNHQ Research Team

You have a SPIN. Or you have a provider name and need the SPIN. Either way, the real question is what to do with it once you have it. (If you just need the number, the fastest route is our free SPIN number lookup: search by name or SPIN and open the provider's full funding profile.)

This guide is for the three types of people who actually do this research: a district procurement officer vetting a potential vendor, an E-Rate consultant auditing who's been serving a client's incumbents, and a competing service provider trying to understand a rival's footprint before walking into a bid. The workflow is largely the same for all three. The interpretation is where it diverges.

What Is a SPIN and Why Does It Matter?

A SPIN (Service Provider Identification Number), also called a 498 ID, is a unique nine-digit number assigned by USAC when a provider completes FCC Form 498. It is the primary identifier that ties a service provider to every funded contract in the E-Rate system.

Every Funding Request Number (FRN) within a Form 471 must list the provider's SPIN. That makes the SPIN the join key between a provider and their funded work: you cannot trace a provider's E-Rate history without it.

A few things that trip up researchers:

  • One company, multiple SPINs. Large providers routinely hold separate SPINs segmented by state, subsidiary, or service type. A national fiber carrier might appear under a dozen different SPINs. If you're building a complete picture of a provider's E-Rate footprint, you need all of them.
  • SPIN changes. When a provider is acquired or rebrands, USAC tracks transfers of FRNs from one SPIN to another. Historical committed dollars may sit under the old SPIN even after the new entity has taken over.
  • SPIN versus FRN. The SPIN identifies the provider; the FRN is the funding request itself. You'll filter by SPIN to find all of a provider's FRNs.

Step 1: Find or Confirm a Provider's SPIN

If you already know the SPIN, skip ahead. If you're starting from a company name, there are two places to look.

USAC's E-Rate Service Provider Download Tool (available at opendata.usac.org) exports service provider profile data from EPC, including contact info, Form 473 and 499 filing status, and the SPIN itself. It's a flat export, not a searchable UI, so you'll filter by provider name or state to find what you need. The tool works, but it requires some patience with CSV files.

USAC's open FRN Status dataset (dataset ID qdmp-ygft on opendata.usac.org) is another path: search a known applicant and provider relationship, pull the FRN, and read back the SPIN from that record. This works when you already know one district the provider serves.

Once you have the SPIN, you're ready to actually research the provider.

Step 2: Pull Their E-Rate Funding History

The FRN Status dataset is the backbone of provider funding research. It contains committed dollars, funding status (committed, denied, pending), and the provider SPIN for every FRN from FY2016 forward. Across a decade of data, you can see how much a provider has been committed across funding years, which service categories they work in, and whether their funding totals are growing, shrinking, or flat.

What to look for:

Year-over-year committed dollars. A provider with $15 million committed in FY2022 and $6 million in FY2026 is losing ground. That trajectory matters whether you're evaluating them as a vendor (is this company healthy?) or as a competitor (are they weakening in certain states?).

Category mix. E-Rate funding splits between Category 1 (connectivity: fiber, broadband circuits, internet access) and Category 2 (internal connections: switches, access points, managed internal broadband services). A provider heavily skewed toward C1 is a connectivity player. Heavy C2 means equipment and integration. Some providers work both. The mix tells you what they actually sell and where they compete.

Denial and pending rates. A high share of denied FRNs signals either compliance issues or aggressive filing strategies that regularly draw USAC scrutiny. Worth noting if you're a district vetting a vendor.

Step 3: Evaluate Win Rate, District Footprint, and Category Mix

Committed dollars are one dimension. The other is breadth: how many distinct applicants does this provider serve, and across how many states?

A provider with $8 million committed across 200 applicants has a very different profile than one with $8 million committed to three large districts. The first is geographically distributed and harder to dislodge. The second is concentrated and vulnerable if any of those three accounts rebids.

Win rate in E-Rate is not as clean a metric as it is in enterprise sales, because applicants don't always file a Form 471 even after receiving bids. But you can construct a useful proxy: for a given provider and funding year, compare the number of Form 470s that named them as the selected provider (visible in Form 471 filing data) to the number of 470s filed by applicants in their service territory where a competitor was ultimately selected instead. FRNHQ's Vendor Insight pages do this analysis directly, pulling scale, win rate by category, and applicant retention across years.

For the district side: look at whether the same applicant appears across multiple funding years. Persistent multi-year relationships indicate a strong incumbent position. A provider who appears with an applicant in FY2022 but not FY2024 and FY2025 lost that account.

Step 4: Identify Re-bid Windows and Contract Expiration Risk

Every E-Rate contract has an expiration date, and when it expires, the applicant has to rebid. That's an opening for competitors and a retention risk for incumbents.

Contract expiration data lives in the FRN records. USAC captures contract type (month-to-month, multi-year), expiration date, and whether extensions are available. You can pull this for a specific provider's FRNs and flag which contracts are coming up for rebid in the next 12 to 24 months.

For the applicant side: any district with an expiring E-Rate contract is back in the bidding market. Their Form 470 will post, and the incumbent will be listed as the current provider in the FRN records. That's the moment to engage.

For the incumbent side: knowing which of your contracts are expiring tells you which accounts need attention before the rebid season opens. Applicants who are happy with their provider often file a new 470 that effectively re-selects the same vendor. Applicants who aren't will take their time evaluating alternatives.

Step 5: What Does FRNHQ Add That the Raw Data Doesn't?

USAC's open data covers FY2016 forward and it's genuinely useful. The practical problem is that using it for provider research means downloading large CSVs, joining across multiple datasets (Form 470 records, FRN Status, Item 21 line items), and building the analysis yourself.

FRNHQ indexes the same underlying data across 286,746 Form 470 records, 790,435 FRNs, and 2,402,629 Item 21 line items from FY2016 through FY2026. The Vendor Insight pages surface the analysis that would otherwise take hours to build: committed dollars by year and category, distinct applicant count, estimated win rate, applicant retention (who stayed, who churned), offering mix across C1 and C2, and a contract-based list of displacement targets sorted by rebid proximity.

If you're researching a specific competitor, you can pull their SPIN-scoped profile, see their full applicant footprint, and identify which of their customers are coming up for rebid. That's the research workflow the raw USAC tools don't provide.

What the USAC Open Data Portal Shows (and What It Doesn't)

The USAC open data portal is the right starting point. The FRN Status dataset, the Form 470 dataset, and the Item 21 line-item dataset are all publicly available, updated regularly, and accurate. USAC deserves credit for making the data accessible at all.

The gaps are structural, not a failure of the portal:

  • No provider-centric view. You can filter by SPIN, but you get raw records, not a summary of a provider's footprint.
  • No win-rate calculation. Deriving a win rate requires joining 470 applicant records to 471 FRN outcomes for the same applicants, which is a multi-table join not available in any single USAC dataset.
  • No re-bid flag. Contract expiration data is in the FRN records, but there's no precomputed flag for "this FRN is expiring in the next 90 days."
  • No trajectory view. Year-over-year growth or decline requires stitching together multiple funding year exports.

The portal is where the data lives. Making the data useful for provider research is a separate step. For context on the broader E-Rate market that shapes how this data fits together, the E-Rate program overview covers the funding structure, discount ranges (20% to 90%), and category rules that determine what each FRN represents.

Common Research Questions You Can Answer with SPIN Data

How much has this provider been committed in E-Rate, total? Pull all FRNs by SPIN, filter to "Funded" status, sum the committed amounts. That's the trailing 10-year revenue picture from USAC.

Which states do they operate in? FRN records include the applicant's state. Filter by SPIN, then count distinct states.

Are they winning new districts or just keeping existing ones? Compare the applicant list in FY2022 to FY2026. New applicants represent new wins. Missing applicants represent lost accounts.

Do they win competitively or mostly through sole-source situations? Form 470 records include whether only one bid was received. A provider who wins primarily in low-competition situations has a different profile than one who consistently wins contested bids.

What specific equipment or services are they selling? Item 21 line items (FY2016 forward, dataset hbj5-2bpj on USAC's open data portal) break out make, model, quantity, and unit cost for C2 line items. For C1, they show the service type and cost. You can build a detailed offering profile from this data.

For providers researching specific geographies, state-level data like E-Rate activity in Texas puts the statewide competitive landscape in context before you drill into individual provider SPINs.

How Does This Fit Into a Real Sales Workflow?

The research is most useful at two moments in the sales cycle.

Before a bid. Pull the incumbent's SPIN, look at their commitment history in the applicant's state, and assess how entrenched they are. A provider with 8 consecutive years of funded FRNs with that applicant is a different incumbent than one who won a single FRN two years ago. Your pitch needs to account for the actual relationship, not a generic "beat the incumbent" framing.

Before filing season. Identify which of your competitors' contracts are expiring in the upcoming funding year. Those are the accounts where a new Form 470 will post, the applicant will be in the market, and you have a real opportunity if you show up early with a relevant offer. The guide on competitive bidding strategy covers how to position once you've identified a target.

Frequently Asked Questions About E-Rate Provider Research

Can I look up any provider's E-Rate history?

Yes. All funded E-Rate data is public. USAC publishes it through opendata.usac.org, and the FRN Status dataset includes provider SPIN, committed amounts, and funding status for every FRN from FY2016 forward.

What if a provider has multiple SPINs?

You need to research each one separately and aggregate the results. USAC's service provider download tool lists all SPINs associated with a company's EPC profile, which is the cleanest way to get the full list.

Can I see which districts a specific provider currently serves?

Yes, with a join. Filter FRN Status records by SPIN, pull distinct applicant BENs (Billed Entity Numbers), and cross-reference against USAC's entity master. That gives you the applicant name, state, and entity type for each account in a provider's book.

How current is the data?

USAC's open datasets update on a regular cadence, typically weekly for FRN Status. Data for the most recent funding year lags during the review period while USAC is still processing applications. FY2026 data is live and growing as commitments are issued.

FRNHQ's Vendor Insight pages pull from the same underlying datasets, updated on the same cadence, and surface the analysis pre-built. If you want to run the research without building the joins yourself, that's the starting point.