Managing network infrastructure (often called outside plant) in the telecom industry is challenging. I'll explain why. For many years I have used a rule of thumb to estimate the complexity of modeling network infrastructure for different industries. For water and gas the network infrastructure is similar, pipes and valves, and you may have 30 or so different types of equipment which means roughly 30 classes of objects or 30 tables in your RDBMS schema. Waste water is similar, but you have to worry about z, because gravity is important. For electric power grids (secondary), things are more complicated, but still manageable. You will find that you will need 100 to 150 classes. But for telecoms, especially in this day and age when copper, fibre, coax, and wireless media are used, you will need hundreds of classes and it is very challenging to develop an application to manage network infrastructure of this complexity.
One of the first companies to attempt to develop software to manage telecom network infrastructure was Telebras, which had a division similar to Bell Labs in the US or Bell Northern Research in Canada. At Telebras Geovane Magalhaes was the technical architect and lead on that project, which resulted in a a system that was remarkable for its time, an integrated outside plant management and provisioning system called SAGRE, that stored spatial data in a relational database (Oracle). At the time Telebras was the only telephone company in Brazil, and most of the operating divisions of Telebras adopted SAGRE for outside plant and provisioning.
Since then Telebras has been broken up and Telebras's IT division is now called CPqD and their outside plant application is called CPqD Outside Plant Management (http://www.cpqdusa.com/solutions/outside.html). CPqD OSPM has been upgraded to support the latest Autodesk and Oracle technology.
One of the operating divisions of Telebras was acquired by Telefonica and renamed Telefonica Telesp. Telesp runs the telephone network for the State of Sao Paulo, which accounts for 60% of the Brazilian GDP. Telesp has over 10 million customers and over 15 million access lines. Every month they process hundreds of thousands of work orders generated by people who want a new phone, to get a new line, or need a repair.
Several years ago they recognized they had some serious problems, the most important of which from a customer service and competitive point of view was that it took weeks for a customer to get a phone. The basic problem was that the work flow for provisioning a phone was inefficient.
Three years ago Telesp initiated a project that was recently completed to automate the entire process of provisioning. Marcos Faria of Telesp was the technical lead for this project and the Telesp IT team accomplished this by a combination of a centralized data repository for all spatial and other data in Oracle, integration with SAP based around the Oracle RDBMS, CPqD's Outside Plant Management with integrated provisioning support, and resolving the as-built problem. The result was that they were able to reduce the cost of provisioning by 40%, which is a huge reduction and an incredible achievement. They also eliminated their backlog and were able to reduce their provisioning life cycle to days from weeks. Not only were the results of the project impressive, they calculated that their ROI was 100% over the three year period of the project.
If you are interested in more information about this amazing achievement, Geovane Magalhaes prepared a presentation about Telefonica Telesp for GITA2005 in Denver.
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