![]() ![]() ![]() “If you had to develop this plan in a CAD environment, it would have taken at least six months,” Brown said. While executing the detailed design work for the project still took time, having initially identified the areas to focus on using GIS made FTC’s more granular construction design efforts more efficient. Esri and its native ability to handle, sort, and display large amounts of data had proved itself as a sound investment.” “The design and drafting department was given a perfect opportunity to show management what their investment could now accomplish. “These areas would have been impossible to identify and prioritize in a timely manner with our current staff,” he continued. “In less than three hours, I had chosen the areas we were going to build for five years,” said Brown. With this, Brown could see where FTC should prioritize its fiber rollout. Maps of address points per mile offered an additional perspective on fiber-to-the-home construction and enabled Farmers Telephone Cooperative to efficiently target marketing campaigns as new network services became available.įTC used the Esri Field Calculator tool, which lets users perform simple or advanced calculations on existing records, to tally all the customers and address points in each square mile. “We quickly had really detailed maps that color-coded the whole service area from light to dark, based on concentration,” Brown said. Within minutes, he could see where FTC’s customers were and where they weren’t. The data that Brown and his team had spent years gathering was ready.īrown got address point records from FTC’s various counties and joined them to existing polygons that show where copper-wire networks are. Management’s directions were simple: hit the highest-density service areas first-the higher the customer concentration, the more sales. The company assigned Brown and his department to come up with a strategy for its largest-ever FTTH rollout. FTC not only had to take into account the existing fiber, it also had to plan for future needs such as additional backbone cabling (the foundation of a telecommunications network) and sturdier network designs that could support more users and data. New fiber designs were becoming much more complex. In 2012, FTC launched a five-year plan to expand its fiber network. FTC then matched these points to its existing CAD data and brought everything into the new GIS. ![]() It located offices, utility poles, pedestals (which house different types of telecommunications equipment), and more, with subcentimeter accuracy. “The best way to waste money and appear incompetent is to build a cable you do not need, or to realize once you have finished there was a spare duct available.”įTC contracted a local engineering company to record more than 70,000 GPS points of “anything you could see above ground,” said Brown. “You don’t know what you need until you know what you have,” he said. Strengthening FTC’s data records-and maintaining them-became his primary goal. Strong business decisions start with the data, Brown said. In 2007, FTC switched to using Esri and Enghouse software to manage its data in GIS-and never looked back. “Our old CAD system was great, but each exchange was its own file, and we were limited one user at a time.” “We needed a more robust software to manage it,” said Brown. There was more competition and pressure to operate on tighter budgets, as well as more data than ever. ![]() “There was redundant data everywhere,” said FTC’s plant design supervisor, Mark Brown.Īround the same time, telecommunications business began soaring. So the designers sent their work to a drafter who re-entered the data into the living master CAD file. They could not transfer their work back to the master file, though, because there was a danger of overwriting someone else’s work. Designers who draft telecommunications networks would extract the data they needed from a master record and work in individual CAD files. Prior to 2007, FTC operated for nearly nine years on a computer-aided design (CAD) system. Customer density maps revealed where Farmers Telephone Cooperative needed to prioritize its fiber-to-the-home construction. ![]()
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