Between the Poles

SpatialInfo User Conference: Using Dark Fiber Trace for Cellular Backhaul Design

SPATIALInfo is holding its 2009 User Conference at Beaver Run Resort and Conference Center in Breckenridge, Colorado at which I gave a keynote. The event is extremely well attended by telco, cable, power, municipal utility and engineering companies.  

I heard a fascnating presentation by Mike Springer and Peter Dart about cellular backhaul. Cellphone antennas are typically connected to the telephone network using T1 lines, but cell phone operators are increasingly finding that T1 is limiting capacity and are looking for other alternatives.  One way is to link to the nearest fiber network, which is often owned and operated by a cable company.  

What Mike first showed was using SpatialNET to locate a cellphone antenna tower and then find the nearest fiber splice point.  The coolest thing that Mike showed was to use a tool called dark fiber trace to trace the fiber network from the splice point back to the head end to determine routing, the availability of capacity, and where splicing is required.   You can even choose to look for several alternative routes to increase diversity.  It was very impressive that in one step you can determine where you have spare fiber and where you need to splice, which you can either design automatically or manually.  And no, this is not a photo of Breckenridge.  I blogged earlier about the palm cell antenna that I found in Abu Dhabi.

SPATIALinfo has been developing telco/cable industry solutions to work with Autodesk products since 1997, and their primary network design and management tool spatialNET is AutoCAD-based and is designed for network engineers to design and manage fiber, coax, copper and power networks, and supports both inside and outside plant. SPATIALinfo is Autodesk’s first Preferred Industry Partner in the cable/telco space.

US Economic Stimulus: $7.2 billion for Broadband Buildout

The highest penetration of broadband (subscribers per household) in the world is South Korea with something like 93 % penetration. In fact in Seoul I believe it exceeds 100%. If I remember, the US just hit 50% penetration last year, so building out broadband, especially to rural areas, is a top priority of the Obama administration.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) includes $7.2 billion for broadband buildouts. But distributing this amount of money is not that simple.  The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is responsible for distributing $4.7 billion in grants to deploy high-speed Internet to unserved and underserved regions.

Massachussetts seems to be ahead of the game, because the state passed a bill in 2008 to created the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, which is a quasi-public agency that's supposed to expand broadband availability by pursuing opportunities, such as stimulus funds.  The state intends to do this by a government private sector partnership.

Managing Infrastructure in Serbia

I want to tell you about another telco that has used geospatial IT to dramatically improve their customer responsiveness and how they did it.  First of all let me give you some operational parameters for Telekom Serbia.  They have about 2.5 million wireline customers and about 3 million mobile customers.  Every day they get about 3 500 customer requests.  This means that every month they have to manage about 200 000 service orders.  These are requests for telephone lines, repairs, and new services.  This is a lot of activity.

A number of years ago Telekom Serbia realized that the world was changing and that they had to change from being a state monopoly to become a competitive telco.  One of the most important aspects of this change was to become more responsive to customers.  Specifically, they could not expect customers to wait months for a new telephone service or a repair.  They had to be able to provision a new telephone service much faster.  This meant using IT to automate the provisioning process.  Telekom Serbia had a special challenge.  Because they has been very decentralized with 15 regions running their own IT systems with different IT technology, their system was not only inefficient, but the different regions could not interoperate.

Radovan Cvetkovic, who is Chief Information Officer at Telekom Serbia, was tasked with solving this problem.  Cvetkovic designed an integrated telecom system, Telecom Information System (TIS), that supports provisioning, engineering design, asset management, billing and accounting, sales, and customer care. Cvetkovic called on Boris Damjanovic, Director of Development at OSA, a Serbian IT consulting firm, to assist with spatially enabling TIS.  A key foundation of TIS is that all data, spatial and tabular, is stored in a centralized database, which represents a single point of truth.  Telekom Serbia chose Oracle because of among other things its field proven scalability and because it supports spatial data types. Cvetkovic wanted to ensure that all data including geospatial is open and accessible across the entire organization.  Damjanovic used Oracle Spatial and a desktop application, Autodesk Map, that integrates CAD and GIS.  The result is that geospatial is integrated seamlessly within TIS. 

Another critical aspect of TIS is scalability.  Over 7 000 Telekom Serbia customers use TIS, and on average 2 000 are onlinc concurrently.

TIS has radically transformed Telekom Serbia.  As Telekom Serbia expands, they are able to perform operationaly much more rapidly.  For example provisioning a new telephone line now takes on average two days instead of forty, and Cvetkovic is optimistic he'll be able to get this down to 5 minutes.  This really is an outstanding example of the power of geospatial IT.

Infrastructure Management in Brazil

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.