SUCCESS STORIES / Operational Excellence

Fiber cable roll out gets 2x faster with design digitization

The network communications company transformed its deployment journey with our solution to automate systems and get designs right the first time.

Background

Optical Fiber is transforming communications at a scorching pace, offering wider bandwidth and enabling consumers to perform data-heavy downloads and transactions faster. The Fiber to The Home/Business market is tipped to expand up to $30 billion by 2026, according to research, growing at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate of 13.1%.

With growing data transmission capabilities, enterprises and individuals are accelerating bandwidth consumption amid a boom in digital services. This has placed communication service providers under pressure to accelerate infrastructure deployment and meet the surging demand for fiber.

To keep pace with the growing demand, planning and design methods in the fiber deployment process need improvement. Performed with large manual contribution, the fiber-laying process involves numerous physical surveys, inspections, and verifications. The fiber is routed from individual junctions called "exchanges" across mapped-out paths adhering to standards set by local city administrators, into the premises of users – homes, and businesses.

Right from layout planning and design to field surveys and quality audits, the process is plagued with human error, repetition of tasks, and waste of resources. Actual costs overrun budgets invariably, eroding the operating margins of the operators. Delayed fiber rollouts blunt the edge of operators as they compete with peers to gain an edge in the market.

Is there a transformation mantra for fiber deployment?

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1.8X reduction in design completion time

90% fiber designs got right-first-time

40% reduction in the overall deployment costs

Client Situation

The client is a communications services company with an expanding market in the US. It offers managed communications services; additionally, it caters to small and midsize businesses with premium broadband, entertainment, and security services. It also has a direct-to-home fiber optic network for individual customers.

The client’s fiber deployment pace is outstripped by demand. It has plans to increase its reach in the domestic segment by 70% in 2023, amid a tight contest from businesses vying for the same market.

The company wants to overhaul its fiber plan and design process to cut task repetition, errors due to manual handoffs, and poor-quality implementation leading to design redoes at the last moment. This means many functions like deciding the right regions for
fiber-laying based on demand, surveying, deployment of fiber, and quality checks must be optimized for efficiency.

Prodapt’s digital design and collaborator tool helps fiber operators double the pace of roll-out, and get designs right the first time.

Diagnosis

In a typical fiber design case, a high-level design (HLD) is charted out by a team of designers. The design, after a series of computer-aided designs and Geographic Information System (GIS) overlay, is handed over to surveyors who reconcile it with details captured on the field. The design goes back and forth between the design desk and surveyors before the final sketch.

After the on-field survey, a low-level design incorporating finer details like splitter ratios, splicing information, and local permissions is drawn up. It includes inputs from field surveyors too, making the process vulnerable to human error. Typically, the manual plan and design process for a region takes about 45-60 days. The steps following design finalization like task collaboration and quality checks are ridden with errors, too.

Solving It

Prodapt explored the idea of automating the design process by providing a basic set of rules and standards, and architectural inputs. Once complete, the process of drafting the design sketch and overlaying it on the GIS systems is automated too.

For the Fiber design teams, Prodapt introduced a tool called the Task Collaborator, a custom-built system developed from an orchestrator to offer a single-window view of tasks, vendors, and teams for efficient coordination. It is also a portal for different teams to share and reconcile data efficiently. The collaborator eliminates manual errors likely to occur in hand-offs between designers and surveyors. Now, surveyors can use the collaborator tool in the field to evaluate whether High-level Design is feasible.

We integrated video enablement with the solution, field operators can capture videos on the field and share them with the design team on the Field Navigator, which can be combined with the Collaborator for effective input interpretation.

Some errors creep into the fiber design and planning process, despite a high degree of automation. We added quality management gates across key points in the
journey – design, survey, documentation, and build – to reduce the need to redo the design at the deployment phase. The solution includes the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to validate quality parameters, as a quality check at the design phase.

The company achieved a 1.8x improvement in design completion time. It was able to get 90% of fiber designs right the first time and the company achieved a 40% reduction in overall deployment costs.

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