Much of designing and running a communications system revolves around spatial problems. During the design phase, engineers need to know where potential customers are, and how to connect them to the network using the least amount of both internal and external plant. When they have the network running, they need to know where that plant is for asset management and maintenance purposes; if a piece of equipment fails, it will affect subscribers in a particular location.
In this and subsequent articles in this issue, we will look at some of these problems, and at how they are being solved. Without question, the most novel and interesting of these applications occur in radio networks. Designing and building a mobile phone network, or one of the new fixed wireless systems, is now providing plenty of work for people in the field.
By contrast, applications in the conventional wireline field are more mundane; there the real interest arises from the sheer size of the application. It is no accident that communications companies run the biggest GIS installations in the country.
In Australia, wireline communications are provided substantially by Telstra, which is majority owned by the Australian government, and Optus, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Singapore government.
Splitting a big project up into bite-sized parcels that can be more readily implemented makes sense, says Tony Cotter, a senior executive with Spatial Info, a Melbourne-based software developer and systems integration house that has been working with Telstra on its spatial IT systems for over a decade.
Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, first ventured into GIS with its Cable Plant Records System, the aim of which was to map the location of every cable in the Telstra network.
The sheer size of the exercise overwhelmed Telstra’s IT network, but new hardware and new technology offered hope to its successor, PlanIT. Telstra decided to use Autodesk’s Vision architecture. Before much could happen, Autodesk decided to discontinue the product, which meant Telstra had to go back to the drawing board.
At press time, a new contract to supply a GIS has still not been decided, although it is believed that the contest is between Spatial Info and Autodesk.
Although Optus is a much more recent network, it also has a history of GIS use. Perhaps
because it is a much smaller network, it also has a much less convoluted history. The company employed MapInfo technology in the first rollout of its fibre, and continues to do so to this day.
One of the senior executives working on the latest GIS implementation, the director of network development, Grant Bowden, says: ‘Using the GIS, we can now provide detailed network information to all our 300 desktop users (a fifty-fifty mix of PCs and Macintoshes).
The real value of this new system is improved customer service both internally and externally, increased productivity, reduced costs, and more importantly, a return on investment. These applications took only six months to deliver. This was an incredibly short timeframe given the complexity of the systems and minimal cost of the total project.
‘It was a large project, so we split it into two phases. The first phase was to deliver the GIS Mode of Operation, Service Qualifications tool to evaluate exactly where customers could be connected to the network.’
The second phase, based on the GIS Mode of Operation Fibre Locator tool, is used for asset and network protection. It runs the ‘Dial Before You Dig’ process. The system can read information via emails from the One Call service and store the details, such as the customer’s location, in an Oracle 8i database. MapInfo’s Geoloc/MapMarker software is then used to find the customer’s location and cross-check against other references.
Both parts of the project are based on MapInfo’s Internet mapping server, MapXtreme. It is being implemented by the Engineering Information Systems Group, the company’s GIS and mapping arm, which is part of the core transmission group, itself made up of engineers, surveyors and geographers. The EIS Group is responsible for improving performance and accessibility to GIS tools across Optus.
At Spatial Info, Tony Cotter is now working on installing GIS in eight other telcos, some in Australia and some overseas, making the company one of the most successful telco specialists in the GIS industry. He says the secret of success is to keep it simple. ‘You need to look at each project as a series of smaller ones. Then you can control each one and confirm your estimates of return on investment before you move on to the next phase of the project. To succeed, you need to crawl before you walk.’
William Smith is a freelance journalist working in Sydney.
