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Welcome back to our blog series on the journey of building fiber networks from the ground up. In the first installment, I shared the whirlwind beginning of our endeavor to support The West Coast Company (WCC) in their nationwide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) buildout. Today, we delve into a critical phase of the network lifecycle: planning.
For those of you that have been in the telecom industry for some time, the following story will more than likely resonate with your own experience. I was introduced to 3-GIS through one of its owners, Tom Counts, and was intrigued with the niche that they had built for themselves specifically in the fiber market.
If you work for a telco and have needed to track your network assets in a centralized way, you may have used Ericsson Network Engineer (ENE) or similar software solution. ENE and many other solutions that rely on Esri technology use geodatabase versioning technology to manage transactions. Versioning facilitates long transactions by allowing editors to work isolated within their own version of the geodatabase and across multiple editing sessions.
As I approach my ten-year anniversary at 3-GIS I have spent some time reflecting on the journey. Many of you may not be aware of this, but I did not start my career supporting the Telecom industry. As a matter of fact, my first job was converting water and electric utility CAD and billing systems to GIS-enabled platforms. From there I worked on large Superfund remediation programs and permitting for trash incinerators which, strangely enough, led me to focus on transportation engineering and mining exploration. From there I had the honor of supporting our warfighters and intelligence communities by providing mapping and innovative GIS application solutions. While this career journey has been somewhat circuitous, I am truly thankful for the wisdom and experience that has been imparted to me along the way.
To be competitive in the telecommunications landscape today providers rely on workflow processes and systems that integrate information across the company to support running the business efficiently. A GIS-based network management system provides telecommunication providers with many key benefits in this ever-changing industry. The GIS system allows providers to build a digital replica of the physical connected network to support all aspects of the business including operations, planning, engineering, provisioning, sales, marketing, and finance. This digital replica of the network enables collaboration across departments providing timely and fact-based information to support better decision making on financial investments, reducing operational costs, and improving customer satisfaction.
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I started my career supporting utilities and their GIS programs, specifically migrating their legacy CAD-based technologies to the latest in Esri-based GIS platforms. Interestingly, a successful migration was not necessarily predicated on a better user experience; but rather, success was measured by the vision and commitment of the customer to change. They knew, for instance, that user adoption would be a slow and painful process and that efficiencies gained would be measured by the operational impact, as opposed to the individual user experience. Enabling the larger organization with the data it needed to make clear and concise decisions was going to be critical in either maintaining a competitive advantage or, for the public utility, delivering quality services at an affordable price. While this change has not been easy, GIS-based technologies are now a critical component to most if not all utilities around the globe.
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Telecommunications is one of the fastest-growing GIS markets in the world. So fast, in fact, it has a forecasted compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.0% from 2021-2026. A large part of this growth is due to the need for stakeholders to understand the network structure on a near real-time basis.