Turbocharging the FTTx Design Process

Laurie Spiegel, Director of Marketing, Telcordia

Growth in fiber-based broadband and the associated network buildouts are exploding worldwide. In the 1990s, cumulative access investment stood at approximately $20 to $40 million globally. By 2015, that cumulative figure will top $60 billion, a 2,000-fold increase. Consider that the copper access network was built over more than 100 years.

This dramatic increase in access investment will likely continue for the next ten to fifteen years. While the popularity of high-speed internet services and digital TV services including HDTV has grown exponentially, many service providers haven’t spent significant money on access improvements in 20 years or more. The current spend is being driven by powerful market forces: the need to enhance the customer experience, compete with a strong set of cable operators, and offset declines in voice revenues.

However, the urgency of those forces makes traditional manual methods of network buildout untenable. Those methods lack scalability, and are simply too labor-intensive and, as a result, too slow, too expensive, and too inconsistent in terms of results. Carriers using these methods find they simply can’t get networks in fast enough to meet competitive and cost pressures.

It’s clearly time for a change. The industry has embraced automated fulfillment as a means for survival; now the efficiencies and consistencies of automation have become a necessity in the Plan to Provision process for FTTx deployment.

Fiber Rollouts Bring Big Challenges

When it comes to massive fiber network rollouts, network design is an extremely complex job that can tax any service provider from both a cost and personnel standpoint. It can take considerable time for even the most experienced designer, given the manual steps involved and the decisions that must be made about placing all the equipment in a network layout. When planners have limited work experience or understanding of engineering guidelines, build-outs can take even more time and money – and after years of access stagnation by providers, many engineers simply do not have the track record to deal with the scale and complexity of FTTx.

There are other challenges that traditional rollout approaches cannot adequately address. In addition to scale and complexity, FTTx networks are expensive. Network build must be optimized, due to the unaffordability of error and the need for right-first-time service quality. There is also more information to model, and representations need to be more detailed.

Using manual planning and design, the workload almost ensures that new hires will be necessary. Yet for most service providers, finances dictate that this should be religiously avoided.

Streamlining the Four-Step Process

Network planning, design, and rollout consist of four main steps, each of which benefit substantially from automation. Telcordia offers a proven, automated solution that mechanizes these labor-intensive tasks in the planning and design process, helping service providers turn processes that take days or weeks into processes that take hours or even minutes.

1) Defining the Fiber Service Area (FSA)  – Without automation, all of the required information must be gathered from multiple sources. Some data may be missing or difficult to obtain, and analyzing information is manually intensive. An automated solution shows the type of dwelling units and other buildings within a selected geographic boundary, allowing planners to validate demand, set engineering rules, and optimize service.

2) Establishing Civil Infrastructure (conduits, poles, manholes, etc.) – Traditionally, providers have had to rely on paper records or autocad, looking at each dwelling unit, identifying existing buried and aerial infratructure, and deciding if it can be used. They have to consider the dwelling in relation to useable civils and the street, how the feeder relates to distribution, and whether the main road has enough civils to service the house. An automated solution, in contrast, identifies all civils and ensures that they can support the build, showing how each and every dwelling will be supported. The designer quickly sees what is available in an area, and the automated solution highlights gaps and suggests ways to fill them.

3) Building the Network – What kind and how much fiber should be used for each dwelling unit? Do you run single, dual, or quad fibers? How do you aggregate service from the aggregation point? An automated solution answers all of these questions and more. For every dwelling, it determines how and what equipment will be placed to satisfy customer demand, taking into consideration the backup dictated by built-in engineering standards for each dwelling and each design. Automation can support every decision point along the way, from choosing the right fiber type and size of the serving terminal, to how traffic is aggregated, to ensuring connectivity all the way to the dwelling unit.

4) Packaging the Work for Downstream Processes – Instead of the usual error-prone, inefficient manual processes, the solution automatically generates electronic bills of materials that feed into financial management and procurement systems, in addition to workprints, schematics, and trace reports for acceptance testing, making sure everything is consistent. Everyone (e.g., procurement, field services, etc.) gets the information they need, with customized view tailored to meet individual needs.

Real Benefits from Automation

A Plan-to-Provision solution for mass market broadband automates the entire four-step process, using consistent rules, consistent records, preferred equipment configuration, cable runs, and fiber connectivity, enforcing industry-standard and customer-specific engineering design rules automatically, every time. It’s a very different method from the idiosyncratic, ultimately frustrating individuality of copper design in the past.

Yet because of that difference, each step in the Plan-to-Provision process is more effectively accomplished, in record time. FSA definition drops from 20 to 4 man-hours. Establishing civil infrastructure is cut from 40 man-hours to one. Build goes from 80 hours to 8, and work order packages are created in 10 hours instead of 20.

Overall, an automated solution results in an average of 35% less planning and design time and cost, with 12% less construction effort and 50% less rework. This means typical savings of $3-4 million for every 100K homes passed. These are not theoretical numbers, either. They reflect actual FTTx rollouts using an automated Plan-to-Provision solution.

That translates to a major bottom line impact for any size provider. A provider rolling out fiber to 500,000 to one million homes can expect to save about $25 million. A provider passing one million to 2.5 million homes can save on average $100 million, and a Tier 1 provider with 3-5 million homes passed can save $150 million or more.

  An Automated Solution Whose Time Has Come

Design automation is a critical requirement for the fast, efficient rollout of fiber on a mass market basis, making those rollouts competitively feasible. An automated, scalable Plan-to-Provision solution dramatically shrinks what is required per FSA. Engineers can be used more efficiently, spending time on critical decision-making and not on drawing network layouts; as a result, new hires can be avoided. A traditionally normal design cycle time of three to six weeks between decision to build-out is cut to five days or less. Automation ensures that network design can be rolled out first time, every time, allowing providers to increase the subscriber base faster, with complete data integrity.

Telcordia has been setting the benchmark for telecom process automation for over 25 years; however, the focus until recently has been on automating Fulfillment processes. The marketplace is telling us that it’s time to apply the same discipline to the Plan-to-Provision process, and providers looking for a real competitive edge are listening.

For more information, contact Laurie Spiegel, Director of Marketing, Telcordia, at lspiegel@telcordia.com or visit our website.