Comsof Fiber 25.1 release new features. 

Welcome to Bite Size Fiber, the podcast where we break down fiber and telecom challenges one bite at a time. I'm your host, Ellie Pulse, and today's episode is a special edition celebrating the launch of Comsof Fiber 25.1. This latest release makes fiber network designs even faster to build and easier to hand off for construction. From smarter cabinet placement and new brownfield deployment support to a more powerful integration with IQGeo's Network Manager telecom, Comsof Fiber 25.1 helps engineering teams produce construction grade designs with less rework and greater accuracy. Joining me today is Yeroen van Aperbeke, product management for Comsof Fiber, to share what's new, why it matters, and how these updates are helping fiber teams scale smarter. Let's dive in. Yeroen, can you start by explaining what breakout structures are and why this feature is a significant step for real-world fiber designs? Yes, of course. So Comsof Fiber has historically been very good at creating high-level designs and making sure that the need for manual drawing of network plans is no longer needed. But of course, the high-level design is not exactly the same as what you would for a rollout. And through the years, we've made improvements, increases to the product, and that will help. And breakout structures is actually the next logical step in this process. What it does is, instead of creating the cabinets or manholes or any type of physical component where you put telecom equipment in, that is now no longer being placed right on the side of the street, so on the trench or the gaps in the ground that are being created. But Comsof Fiber allows these to be placed some distance away from the trench network. So that's, for example, not on the corner of the street right next to the street surface itself, but some distance removed. If you have concrete surface or some open ground, it's possible to put cabinets, let's say 10, 15 meters away from the trenches and make sure that all the components get created to have that prepared for low-level design. And this includes a couple of components. So the first thing that is necessary in any Comsof Fiber design is that the input data needs to be cleaned up and created. And as with the other functionality that comes with the other functionality that Comsof Fiber provides, this is also done. So the automatic generation of input data is present. You can choose to start this from intersections, from trenches, from equipment. And there's lots of options to create these possible breakout locations. And then once you actually go and do a design, these will be evaluated and the best ones will be selected for actual use by the software. It's really cool. And then how do users configure all that? So there's a couple of things that need configuration. And the most logical one or most necessary one is the ducts. So all of the ducts end up in the trenches, logically. Typically, they end up at the cabinet, which was on the trench earlier, but now that cabinet has been moved. So you need to have an additional piece of ducts between the old and the new location or the breakout structure and the outer location of the equipment and network. And that's fully configurable. So either you can choose to have a cost optimized solution that Comsof Fiber chooses the ducts that are lowest in cost. Or you could also force it to have a special duct, which is reinforced, bigger. That's all quite configurable to select the best ducting solution in place. That's the duct level. And then going a bit deeper into the contents of these ducts. In terms of cables, it's also quite configurable. So cables can be spliced in the manhole in front of the cabinet. Cables can be pulled through the cabinet itself. So there's lots of flexibility in each of these options that can be configured at the standard Comsof Fiber rules interface. So would you say that this helps to make more lower level designs? Yeah, it will make it easier to create lower level designs. Previously, this either needed to be done manually or in the as-built creation. So it will be much more easy to move from the high level design to the low level design. So yes, in that sense, a planner could create more low level designs in a shorter time frame. What kinds of customer challenges led to developing this capability? Yeah, so as mentioned, the gradual evolution of Comsof Fiber going more and more to the low level design. So we want to make sure the design is as detailed and as realistic as possible. That's from the planning point of view. But there's also a couple of real world situations that we got the specific questions from our clients. And that's health and safety. So the cabinet is a location in the network that engineers typically spend quite a bit of time to create splices, to go for maintenance jobs. And yeah, that location needs to be safe to work on. And if that location is as removed from the range network, like I said, the 15 meters or something, it's quite a lot safer than if they are just at the side of the street. That's good in terms of health and safety. Another example was to make sure that it's just easier to access the cabinet. If you have a network situation where there are other line operators needing access to the same cabinet, then it's best if they have a bit of room to work in. Maybe it's different trays, different racks in the same equipment. And it's best if these can be accessed. So it just adds more room for different parties to work in. And a final example is if the manhole or cabinet has limited capacity or available trays and so on, they can be put in one or the other. So it just adds more physical room for the deployments in the field. That's really interesting. Can you share another example where breakout structures can help reduce manual cleanup post-design? Yeah, very much so. So better accuracy of a design leads to making sure that the crews that will actually make the deployment are better equipped. They can take the materials with them in the truck to make sure everything is in place, avoiding truck rolls and so on. But also that they have the right schematics in place. They have the right drawings and so on to deploy or create the network as it should be done. So that's the first time right strategy. So everything that has to do with preparation in the office, then the construction crews go out into the field, they build everything, and then they come back with the as-built updates. And it's very clear if you use these kind of more detailed steps in the creation of a design, the as-built plans will also be much closer to the reality. And there should be less as-built updates after deployment. So yeah, there's definitely an increase in efficiency. Nice. And it sounds like this is going to help with accuracy too. So one of the exciting parts of this release is the new connectivity engine within the integration module. Can you tell us what that is and what problems it's solving? So that's a piece of functionality that is available within the network manager interface. And what the connectivity engine does is it allows to get more specific connectivity requirements in place. So ComsoFiber does the higher design, make sure all of the trenches, ducts, cables are in place. And then the connectivity engine goes one step further and will also ensure fiber connectivity is done in the right way. ComsoFiber also has a default fiber connectivity model. But talking to various clients of ours, we wanted to get a more flexible mechanism for both customizations that can be easier to achieve, but also configuration. So that our expert users can do quite a lot in the config section of network manager with the JSON configurations. So that really achieves flexibility on the fiber level that was not there previously. And is the new connectivity engine, is this an iteration of the last one or is this completely new functionality? It is actually completely new functionality. And the interesting thing is this is not just for data coming from ComsoFiber, but also data that would come from another place. So if a number of manual designs have been created, you could also use this connectivity engine to create the specific fiber level connectivity. Or if there's another tool that has a CD file that is imported, that can also be run through the connectivity engine and updated with the various additional pieces of fiber connectivity. I'm excited to see how everybody can use this. The goal really is here to avoid manual effort as much as possible in using network manager fiber connectivity. We also have two specific implementations that are available out of the box that come along with the integration module 2.1. And that's standard implementation of a multi-port connectivity model that we typically see being used in the United States. On the one hand, there's also a more European-flavored operator with splice trays, patch panels, and all the equipment that goes along with that. What improvements have been made to the user experience and the interface in this release? So there's two main things here. The cable clusters for experienced ComsoFiber users, that's something that they've definitely worked with. But it's a visualization of the specific points that will be connected to a shared cable. So a cable can connect multiple cabinets, let's say, by going in and out of the cabinets. And with the cable clusters, you will see which cabinets are connected to a cable, which is something that was not yet available in the interface in NMT. We've now added this and it's also adjustable, making sure that if the shared cable would need to have an other collection of points to be served, that would be changeable by users. And then after locking and recalculation, this will be taken into account. So that's the first one. The second improvement to the UI is we've cleaned up the visualization of a ComsoFiber workspace, making sure it's more easy to see what's going on. And there's just a better user experience in terms of visualization. And so with the integration, we've seen improvements to CDIF data interchange in this release. How does this benefit customers using ComsoFiber with Network Manager Telecom? So we had a couple of clients that gave us feedback on the format of CDIF. So CDIF is the data file that gets generated by ComsoFiber and which then gets imported into a Network Manager. And the feedback was that there was a bit too much data in there, specifically in terms of route junctions and virtual access structures. And that's something that we spent work on to make sure that there's more compact data set available for these specific objects. So that should lead to both reduced file size on the CDIF file and also an easier loading of that file and better results once it's actually imported into a Network Manager. And then on the ducting side, we've improved the creation of conduit runs. So a conduit run is now end-to-wind visible for the ducts that have been generated by ComsoFiber. And then there's another improvement on ring cables. That direction is now correctly set. Previously, that was all undirected, but now we've created correct direction. And then a couple of small changes such as foreign characters, which are now supported, Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, and so on. Support for that is now also in place. Cool. How does this reduce errors or manual adjustments when moving from planning to build? That is a good question. On top of what I've just outlined, we've also added more attributes to the data that was already in the CDIF files. There's two concepts within ComsoFiber. That's deployment and connection. And these being brought into Network Manager allow to filter and visualize data based on the different deployment phases. So it's more easy to see if you have multiple phases being defined by ComsoFiber. It's easier to see what is phase one, what is phase two, and so on. So that is something that will definitely help a planner if they need to define multiple phases, work in multiple phases. And that, combined with the previous comments I made, will allow a planner to stay within Network Manager and work much more efficiently. Because it means that there's no lookups needed in the workspace or other tools or databases. So the goal is really to have the single pane of glass functionality in Network Manager and avoid having to look at different systems when creating a design. So finally, what's next for ComsoFiber? Are there any future innovations on your roadmap that you're excited about that will help customers design and deploy fiber networks even more efficiently? Yes, indeed. So the team has already started on the developments for the next ComsoFiber 25.2, which is target for the fourth quarter of this year. And the main things that we'll be looking at is, first of all, performance benchmarks. So we had quite a lot of questions from clients in terms of how long does it take to calculate a certain area? How big can we go in terms of demand points or geographical area to calculate in ComsoFiber? So that's what the team will be looking at, creating benchmarks on a typical workspace size. So starting from small, medium, large, very large. See which operations take the longest and make sure we can publicize the analysis of that. So that's the first starting point. But of course, the next step would then be to also make sure we can improve the performance. Because if we know where the bottlenecks are, we can increase them and make sure that the areas we can tackle can grow over time. All of this will definitely be available for our ComsoF Cloud calculation engine. So that's the AWS-hosted SaaS calculation engine that we have because we control the hardware there. And for that, it's much more easy to have a stable solution, a stable constellation of computers, calculators in place. And then check that we can have a certain stable calculation time there. Second thing is the fiber throughput percentage to be lower than 100%. What I mean with that is a typical fiber network is not deployed for full coverage. You will definitely try to reach all of the clients within an area. But if there are multiple operators in play, the chance that you will get all of them is very small. So we will provide the capability of reducing the fiber throughput at various levels in the network. So this could, for example, mean if you have a cabinet with 100 clients having a fiber terminating in that cabinet, there's only capacity to go from that cabinet to the feeder layer of 60 or 80 fibers, for example. In which case, we would have respectively 60 or 80% throughput. Up to now, Comsof fiber did not support that because we always have a full rollout. Every client needs to be able to be connected. But in that specific case, if you know that the full connectivity of all clients are not reached, it is useful to get to a lower number of fibers, which helps you in download capacity when you go closer and closer to the central office. So this is something that we will provide in a flexible way on various layers in a network, making sure that the fiber throughput can be lowered and have less fibers going into the center of the network. Both of these are on the Comsof fiber side. And then a third thing is both in Comsof fiber and also in Network Manager, the integration component. What we will do here is making sure that there is a synchronization in place between the Comsof fiber rules and then in Network Manager, the cost and specification manager. So these two are quite closely linked. Today, you can use the same definitions of objects in both of these configurations, but that needs to be synchronized manually. And of course, we want to make sure that our users have to do as little housekeeping as possible. And that's why we were setting up a synchronization between the two, making sure that you can control everything from the Network Manager specification and cost manager, and then changes there will ripple through to the Comsof fiber rules. So that's definitely a step forward in terms of usability in that respect. Awesome. Well, I am excited to see 25.2 and what you guys come up with. Thanks so much, Shirin. It's clear that Comsof fiber 25.1 is all about bridging the gap between planning and real-world deployment with smarter automation, better integrations, and practical enhancements that save teams time and reduce rework. For listeners who want to learn more, head over to iqgeo.com or reach out for a live demo. Thanks for tuning in to ByteSize Fiber. See you next time.