As the rapidly increasing demand for enhanced telecommunications infrastructure continues to grow, it has become essential for service providers to ensure their dollars are well spent in deploying new network infrastructure. Until recently, service providers have had to maintain their physical network assets in one database separately from the services that depend on them in a second database. This created many challenges, with the major drawback being that it didn’t allow up-to-date network information that could be easily shared and accessed throughout all aspects of the organization.
Today, service providers can leverage GIS-based fiber maps, carrier network maps, and fiber-lit building data to more easily access more up-to-date records of their and other carrier network assets. In today’s competitive fiber landscape, these telecom GIS products help service providers lessen unnecessary capital expenditures and maximize their revenue potential by increasing productivity in their network design, knowledge management, and competitive carrier information, rather than relying on archives of paper maps or other, more inefficient methods.
Here are just a few ways that fiber maps can be utilized to help tie together the needs of many business departments in an organization:
- The engineering department needs to know the physical location of fiber splices, determine line loss, understand how new customers can be served from the existing network, and create detailed construction plans for planning new networks.
- The operations and sales departments need to see and understand which services are available at which addresses in a specific metro area.
- The transport department needs to know which transport circuits are tied to specific fiber strands – in other words, which customers are serviced by which fiber strands. In case of an emergency or an outage, they may need to determine which customers are affected.
- The provisioning department needs to analyze existing infrastructure in order to determine how to prepare and equip the network to provide new services to users.
At GeoTel Communications, our telecom data products integrate telecommunications infrastructure data with GIS so that users can accurately and efficiently analyze this data in a spatial environment. Call the GeoTel team at 407.788.8888.
