Increased Effectiveness ThroughNetwork Records and Fault Location

Ian Drury

GIS Consultant

• Introduction

• Network Records

• Automated Fault Location

• Summary

agenda

BT

BT is one of Europe's leading providers of telecommunications

services. Its principal activities include local, national and

international telecommunications services, higher-value

broadband and internet products and services, and IT solutions.

In the UK, BT serves over 20 million business and residential

customers with more than 29 million exchange lines, as well as

providing network services to other licensed operators.

BT Exact

One of the World’s largest Comms R&D Organisations

8,500 people

10,000 patents - networks, mobility and wireless, etc

Currently work on around 10,000 projects

Design, develop and deploy some of the largest and most complex IT and comms networks in the world

BT Engineers

Used Paper Records

Where? What? How?

Plant Records - The Good Old days!

BT’s Plant Records

Drawing offices manually updating linen master records using pen.

Paper records scanned and local system used by Drawing Offices to updateon screen.

Up to 1999

1999 to 2001

2001 on Local servers linked to Central Unix Server

BT Network Records

4 Plant records existed

4 6.1M Customers visited / Year

4 New technology beingintroduced

4 17,000 Field based engineers

Starting Point

4Access for ALL engineers

44 Layers of map based data

4 Facility to locate BT plant andcustomers

4 Access to data at all times

4 Easy and speedy access

4 Submit work requirements from site

System Requirements

4 Increase field effectiveness

4 Reduced costs

System Benefits

Development Costs = 1.5 hrs/ engineer/year

Network Records Architecture

4User upgrades

4Web Version

4High speed mobile comms e.g. WiFi and HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access)

4Increase customer base

Future

BT Fault Locator

A Telco Network

A measure of how much electrical charge a line can hold.The more conductor there is, the higher the capacitance. So...

Longer Line => Higher Capacitance

Shorter Line => Lower Capacitance

So we can use capacitance to tell us the approximate line length though there are other factors that affect capacitance:

• Gauge of the wire• Moisture

Capacitance

Use the road network. But where does the cable go?

Customer with Fault

PCP

Good Route

Fault locator

Fault LocatorOracle Spatial

Line Test Information

Customer ServiceSystems

OS Mapping Data

Customer Fault data

Engineering WorksheetsNearest address

Generates an accurate route for each fault so thatcapacitance comparison can be used.

Piper Vectorisation

PIPeR (Physical Inventory, Planning andeRecords) is a system supporting the end-to-endplanning process for the provisioning and repairof BT’s network

PIPeR will manage all BT’s physical inventory

This entails converting raster network records for60m network assets, 74m copper cables and400k fibres into an ‘intelligent’ vector format

Happy…….

Summary

Oracle Spatial - a Core Technology for BT

Thank You ian.drury@bt.com