As the glue interlinking everything from the industrial ‘Internet of Things’ to smart grids and underpinning the real-time social and economic services of the future, full fiber and 5G is increasingly recognized as an essential national utility. With superfast broadband forming the enabling technology for social and economic progress, any outages could have an equally devastating effect to power or water shortages. Europe is already pioneering ways of improving infrastructure’s resilience to climate change. This is becoming increasingly critical as superfast broadband faces a more distributed, fluctuating and unpredictable threat landscape than ever before.
Full-fiber cables are vulnerable to underground water while 5G will move radio signals to even higher frequencies where they are more susceptible to weather interference. For example, Hurricane Sandy damaged Verizon’s Northeast network and some basement-level communications hubs, while in 2018 Hurricane Michael caused major flood damage to underground fiber-optic cables in Florida. Achieving resilience across the telecoms sector will mean understanding the complex intersection of infrastructure above and below ground. Future fixed and mobile connectivity networks will all be 5G so that everything from underground fiber cables to radio waves will need to be managed as a single interconnected ecosystem above and below ground. Knowing the location of all infrastructure will be critical to understanding where all our fiber optic cables and 5G antennae intersect with the people and places that will need them. It is also vital to understand the common vulnerabilities that could produce a single point of failure affecting multiple overground and underground networks. Infrastructure planners will need to know the location of 5G networks in relation to nearby threats and hazards. Hazard data may even need to be shared with rival telecoms operators and authorities to ensure common resilience across the sector.
The Data Gap
This presents a major challenge because many telcos do not have current, comprehensive data on overground and underground assets in an integrated, easily accessible and shareable format. Many current systems fail to fully capture live insights from both workforce and network assets. Network data is rarely held in a modern, mobile-friendly format which is accessible to field workers or contractors. Many networks do not link all network data with location, which is critical to understanding risks in all regions of their network. Smaller operators are frequently not documenting their network in a digital SoR (System of Record). All too often, network data is not only siloed within an organization, but also incompatible with external datasets such as meteorological or ecological satellite data. This also means it cannot easily be shared with other organizations or authorities to help combat common vulnerabilities and ensure sector-wide resilience.
For example, there are 3.4 million miles of underground infrastructure including data lines and fiber-optic cables in the UK alone, yet there is no up-to-date or integrated map of this subterranean labyrinth. This makes it impossible to achieve common resilience against underground threats such as flooding or to see how other present or planned underground utility infrastructure might pose hazards to telecoms networks.
To help prioritize critical services and customers for maintenance or upgrades, operators need comprehensive and current location-based information on underground fiber-optic networks in relation to all the critical settlements and services that depend on them. Similarly, without a single map of infrastructure above ground, operators cannot predict how local weather might affect antennae.
In a pioneering example of what could be achieved, London is working with companies to create a combined mobile-friendly map of its subterranean infrastructure where the site and source of hazards in relation to overground services can be swiftly identified.
Achieving resilience
Telecoms’ unpredictable, varied, and fluctuating threat landscape means operators must now go beyond reactive risk management and recovery and adopt forward thinking and predictive network resilience. Creating resilient 5G networks will require a holistic overview of the site and the source of potential threats across overground and underground infrastructures. Crucially, all fixed and mobile networks will need to be managed as an interconnected ecosystem regardless of the location of physical infrastructure. Key to this challenge is the ability to combine data from multiple sources and harness all of a network’s assets as a source of real-time threat intelligence. This means adopting geospatial information systems capable of capturing a wide array of network data from employee smartphones to IoT sensors and matching it with precise and accurate location data to reveal the locus and the solution for every problem anywhere in the network. Accurate SoRs and ‘as-builts’ are critical to ensuring a comprehensive and current risk overview across all infrastructure and effectively targeting mitigation strategies, from repositioning antennae away from threats to replacing copper wire with fiber-optic cable. Matching all telecoms data with location data is essential to contextualizing threats, revealing interdependencies with neighboring infrastructure that could create shared vulnerabilities, and identifying priority customers or communities to protect. Using open platforms capable of integrating network information with external sources is also vital to allowing important information to be shared with authorities or other operators. This also allows network data to be merged with relevant external sources of risk intelligence such as weather or vegetation data.
Below I have outlined some steps companies can take to create data-driven resilient grids.
Step 1: Democratize network data
Operators must devolve responsibility for updating network information across the workforce, from field technicians to office managers. This involves harnessing open, mobile-friendly geospatial information platforms that can capture information from a decentralized array of sources, from IoT sensors to field worker smartphones. As-builts and systems of record should be digitized and easily accessible to workers on the ground who can ensure they stay accurate and up to date. This empowers workers, creating a sense of collective responsibility for network intelligence and resilience. Opening up network data should also extend to the use of open APIs to integrate location-based network data with important information from external sources such as weather hazard data.
Step 2: Risk assessment and resilience
Assess the network to identify and remove systemic vulnerabilities and single points of failure. Since all fixed and mobile networks will ultimately be 5G, organizations must ensure they have integrated, comprehensive and current geospatial information on all infrastructure above and below ground so they can easily identify threats. Companies should be creating network-wide digital ‘dashboards’ tracking live, location-based intelligence revealing the site and source of hazards such as storms or cyber-attacks. Operators must ensure they can capture live information from any device in the field, and that their network location data is accurate and up-to-date, so they can take rapid remedial action or mitigate risks specific to each region. Virtualization of networks also means the equipment itself can indicate risk or damage and this can be matched with location data to create a digital twin of networks that encourages more agile, adaptable risk management.
Step 3: System resilience & security
Whether organizations adopt third-party cloud environments or bring this in-house, they must support geographic resilience, system redundancy, and the latest advances in cyber security. Critical network software must ensure data is duplicated and encrypted to drastically lower the likelihood of singular points of failure.
Step 4: Incident response
Have a company-wide damage assessment and incident response strategy, both to preempt current threats and to provide insights which can be used to predict and prevent future risks. Organizations should start by creating a live, location-based overview of damage, degradation, or hazards to the network across both overground to underground infrastructure. Incorporating this data into incident reports not only helps create more rapid and even predictive maintenance of networks, but also encourages a proactive and predictive risk management model that can draw on past incidents to inform future solutions. For example, data on regions at risk of flooding can be used to protect nearby fiber-optic cables but also to inform planning of future networks that mitigates identified risks. In this way, networks grow collectively stronger and smarter from every incident.
Step 5: Practice
Stress-test systems, people, and processes with regular rehearsals to ensure resilience is drilled into all company procedures, workers, and systems. Just as companies perform health and safety training, they should test and train all assets for network resilience. This will ensure that best practice is baked into the organization.
The threats facing the telecoms industry today are constantly changing, extreme weather and other recent trends pose the threat of a ‘black swan event’ that affects entire systems of networks. However, by digitizing and decentralizing network data and creating proactive resilience strategies, telecoms organizations can take control. As 5G networks increasingly comprise a mix of networks and infrastructures above and below ground, the key is to integrate live data from all assets and manage telecoms grids holistically as a single living ecosystem. It is vital that network geospatial systems are a ‘living document’ constantly drawing on live intelligence from the field.
Contributed article by Jay Cadman, SVP Enterprise, IQGeo
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