Fiber networks
Super Charge your Fiber Planning Team
Hosted in partnership with the Fiber Broadband Association.
We share how you can super-charge your fiber planners and reduce the overall planning and design time by as much as 90% and simultaneously save up to 10% in network build costs.
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David Norris, Webinar Program Manager, FIBER Broadband Association Webinar Today's Webinar is titled Supercharge Your Fiber Planning Team and it's presented by IQGeo. I'm David Norris, Webinar Producer here at FBA. Before we begin, I just have a couple of quick housekeeping items for you. So first, all of our attendees are in listen-only mode today. However, we want you to ask questions and encourage you to do so. To ask questions, use the control panel on the side of your screen and type them into the questions pane, and we will address those near the end when we get to our question and answer session. So please take advantage of that. This webinar is being recorded and will be available on demand through the FBA website about 24 to 48 hours after the live broadcast here. Just note that you will have to be an employee of a member organization, of an FBA member organization to access that. If you are and you don't have credentials, we just put a link in the chat, which will provide guidance on getting credentials to that website if you are part of a member company. And so with that, let's dive right in. So scale of new fiber deployments, determining the best deployment architecture, the cost of fiber to the home builds are just some of the challenges that providers and operators face. And their network planners need to address these challenges. And a big part of that, what can help is having the best tools to do so that will enable your teams to move quickly, accurately, and efficiently. So today I'm excited to be joined by IQGO's James Wheatley, the head of product management there at IQGO, and Yeroen van Haberbeck, who's product manager at ComSoft, or with the ComSoft Fiber at IQGO. They're going to discuss the automated design solutions based on ComSoft Fiber, which provide tools to supercharge your planners and significantly reduce the overall planning design time while also reducing the cost to build. And so with that, welcome James and Yeroen. We are happy to have you on and eager to learn more. And with that, James, I will go ahead and hand things over to you. James Wheatley All right. Thanks very much, David. So welcome everybody. Nice to have the opportunity to present to you. And Yeroen is just going to fire up the slides. And obviously, as David said, we're going to do a bit of a double act here for you. And so yeah, we're going to talk about supercharging your fiber planning team. So if we move to the next slide, just to recap who we are. So as David said, I'm James Wheatley. I'm the head of the product management team at IQGO. And Yeroen, I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah. Good morning. My name is Yeroen van Haberbeck. I'm the product manager for ComSoft Fiber, which is the component that does most of the automation within the IQGO stack. So thanks very much. So on the next slide, with IQGO, we're all about building better networks. So that's both from a telecoms perspective and from a utilities perspective. There's the slide advancing. There we are. Lovely. Just a little bit of a delay there, I think. So yeah, all about building better networks. And our primary focus is, as I said, both the telecoms domain and also we have solutions in the utility space as well. Now, clearly, we're going to focus on telecoms today. And we talk about network lifecycle. So designing, building, selling and operating networks all around creating better, safer, more efficient networks and the processes that support those. So if we look at the next slide. This is really, you know, we talk about process. That's what these different stages of the network lifecycle are. And what we're trying to do is help you guys in the operator community to save time and costs by accelerating those different parts of the workflows that you need to execute successfully run your business. And the key enabler of that is a shared geospatial network model. And that's what we provide with our network manager telecom product. So that underpins all of these different operational processes all the way through design, build, sell and operate. So if we're just at a very high level, I'll just run over those processes just so we're all kind of talking the same language and understanding where we're coming from. So design and that's clearly the focus of today's webinar, but really around optimizing that design process. So as David mentioned in the introduction, speeding that process up and being able to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And often with the scale of the FTTH builds that you're dealing with, manual processes are just manual design is just not going to be an appropriate way of handling that. So we want to be able to do that as quickly as possible to be able to get the design throughput we need, but equally in an optimized way so that we can also look at how we can reduce the costs associated to the network builds as well. And as I say, that's going to be the focus of what Jeroen will take us through in a few minutes. And then if we look at the build station, clearly we've designed a network. Now we want to go build it. We need to construct it and there's a couple of key aspects there clearly in many, many environments that is outsourced to contractors. And we need to make sure that that overall process and the way that you work with your contractors or indeed, if you are a contractor, you work with your, you know, the operator that you're working with is optimized and is good for everybody there. Because ultimately what we're looking for is predictable rollouts, rollouts that meet the cost expectations and then can achieve the business case that was put together in the first place to support that. So that's the build side of things. And actually that will be a focus for a future webinar that we'll be running with the FBA as well shortly. And then we've built this thing. Now we actually want to sell it. So we actually want to monetize this network, generate some return on the investment that has been put in to put that infrastructure in place. Now clearly in an FTTH network and in response to what we're talking about today largely, often that's a fully automated process or that's what we're aiming for, a sort of zero touch provisioning type process or as close to that as is possible. And that's certainly feasible and that's something that we work with a number of our customers to enable as we are that geospatial network model. We understand where the network is, which splitter ports are available, where particular customers need to be connected and so on and so forth. But actually another area is really the business to business market or segment. So that segment is particularly important revenue generation stream for for operators and being able to handle the request for service coming through that stream very quickly and efficiently is very important. So that really provides some capability there to maximize the revenues that we can generate on that business to business segment is important. And I'll touch on that a little bit towards the end of the presentation as well. And then finally, network operations. So there's a variety of processes we have to deal with faults, things will go wrong, unfortunately. So whether that's unforeseen circumstances forced on us by the weather, people inadvertently crashing cars into telegraph poles, whatever that may be, there'll be things that we have to deal with to keep the network up and running. And there's also processes that we have to adhere to from a regulatory perspective as well. So poll inspections being a good example of that. And that's all about getting the right information at the right time to the right people. So primarily enabling field teams and operations teams to have access to that data to make that as an efficient process as is possible. So that's the kind of overall kind of bigger picture of these workflows. And I mentioned network manager telecom as the capability that underpins all that. So on the next slide, I can just get into a little bit more detail about what network manager telecom actually provides. So it's primarily a physical network inventory solution. So geospatially based, as you can see from the couple of screenshots there. And you'll see in the product demonstration later on, actually what the software actually looks like. And this is around providing a number of key capabilities. So giving you that ability to have a digital twin of your network. So understanding where the network is accurately and spatially and how it is connected is fundamental to being able to successfully operate that network. So being able to quickly locate particular fibers, splice closures and so on, especially as we talked about in a fault scenario, understanding that network location and network connectivity is vitally important. And in the previous slide, I talked about the whole network lifecycle. So supporting different aspects of the network lifecycle is very important. And now it doesn't mean that you have to, you know, although IQ. Joe provides solutions across that lifecycle, don't have to use every single capability that the IQ. Joe provides. So you can mix and match. It's a modular capability. So you can use what we have to be able to help solve particular business problems. And obviously the focus of today's webinar is around network design. So that's a particular area that we can provide solutions to to help your business. And what we look to provide is is industry best workflows and templates. So we recognize that in order to get quick time to value, you want to be able to get up and running very quickly. And so being able to provide pre-configured templates and workflows is very helpful in that regard. But equally, we still provide a great level of flexibility and configurability to you as the operator to match your specific business needs and business requirements. So it's it's definitely not a one size fits all approach. It's very much a being able to tailor that to your particular your particular needs. And as part of that, we offer that in a number of different additions across the the product portfolio as well. Starting some very simple, very easy to use, scaling all the way up to a full enterprise deployment, giving you the total flexibility to be able to integrate and customize the solution to meet your needs. The next point I wanted to bring in is around mobility. So the mobility is the is a really important aspect. It's kind of in our DNA really being able to take information in the in the from the office out into the field in a very seamless manner. And importantly, it's not just the data about the network. It's the functionality of the application as well. So if you're an office user or a field user, you have access to the same information and same capability, sorry, regardless of where you where you are working. And that's very important. And it's something that's quite a differentiator for for IQ. And then the last point here is is really scalability for the future. So obviously we have quite large customers that we support and we've proven our scalability. We have customers with with thousands of users. We have a web based architecture that allows us to easily scale that to meet the demands of large field communities. And of course, large numbers of users in the office and doing network design, for example. So that gives you a bit of an overview. And now I want to sort of bring it back to to the specific topic around design. So I think we've got a poll here that we're able to to look at. So what are your biggest challenges in your current design workflows? Is that your input data quality? Is it your design speed? So can you get the throughput or is it actually the the resulting output of the design? The quality of that is that consistent? Is it, you know, meets all your design rules and so on? So be interested to get your input into that. And there's the there's the results. Okay, interesting. So the the input data quality, I can't say I'm necessarily surprised by that. That's something that we consistently see from from our customers as well in our experience. And I guess the the output quality as well is is something that's important. And I guess speed is something that in many cases operators you've found ways to do that or indeed, maybe you've outsourced it. And so, you know, it's actually design consultancies that are doing the heavy lift there to to provide that that throughput. So that's very interesting feedback. So thanks for taking the time to to provide that. So if we move on to the next one, so really just this is now sort of let's focus specifically on that design piece and being able to to automate and optimize that process within our overall solution. So at that point, I will pause and thanks for your attention. I'll hand over to Jeroen. I'll be back a little bit later to where to finish things off. All right. Over to you, Jeroen. Yep. Thank you for that, James. So I'll be talking about various aspects of the design process. And then the last part will also show demo of the network manager and console design interaction and the whole workflow. So first of all, there are a couple of flavors of automated design. You have some aspects that you can consider and how much automation is done in that. So first you have cost versus design. Do you want to put more time and cost in the design phase or is it more towards the boot phase that you want to put your focus and make more cost and design? Of course, there's a risk phase there. If you say, well, let's not spend too much attention on the design phase, but spend more cost on the boot space, then it's quite risky because you don't really know where the whole design may end up with. So that's quite challenging from time to time. Looking at granularity. And how far should the design go in terms of checking the details and seeing which aspects to involve? So if you ask the question, what does IQG think that you need in granularity? The answer would be as much as you can. So GIS data is really the main component that you see at the center of any network design. And that's essential to see what can be possible, what should happen for certain designs. And it will allow you to also arrange scenarios comparing different equipment types, different choices in cluster size, different network architectures. All of this is enabled by GIS data. So the design that we recommend is really to go in as much detail as you can. And then lastly, design also has typical, well, no, a role out typically has different phases. So the phases needs to be taken into account from the design phase, because if you design everything as a single network, which is built on one day, that's just not realistic. So we need to be sure that any design can take into account. There are a number of phases which will build over months or even years. So that's an important aspect that also is in any design project. So as I mentioned, GIS for us is really the course and the central component of anything that we need, that we do in terms of designing. So what do we mean with GIS input data? So are mentioned here, addresses, poles, streets, but also parcel data, as you can see in the image, existing infrastructure, if that is present. All of this is information that you can take into a design and really use and try to reuse as much as you can to reduce costs. Of course, as we just saw in the poll, the data quality can be a bit of a challenge and the accuracy is very important there. You need to have exact home counts, exact available capacity for any component that you want to reuse. And all of this is really important because if you start from GIS data that is not adequate, that is not trustworthy, then any design to make based off of that will also be not of high quality. Because the runner up in the poll was really the output data quality. Well, in my view, this is the large part based on the input data. If you put in data, it's not very good. What will result out of the design will also not be very good. So it really needs to start at the beginning, making sure that you can have a data set that is as accurate and as good as possible. Yeah. So the amount of data you have is also important. Then going a bit further. So once you have the input data, the second part of configuration we need is network architecture. So on the right hand side, you see a possible network architecture, which is a three layer network architecture, feeder distribution and drop each with maximum distances with ducts and fibers defined. And all of this is very important because you need to decide during the design phase, which numbers you will use, which equipments you will use. And all of this can be configured in the Comso fiber configuration, as you can see on the bottom. And of course, as I mentioned before, this is really useful because in our software, you can model different architectures, different equipments, different choices, and then compare them with one another in a number of scenarios. So as I said, material equipment, cables, ducts, closures, all of this can be modeled, can be described, and then just to the next slide. An important point to add here is that the cost is also a parameter that can and should be added to as much component as possible. Because this will determine certain design choices that our software will make. If you compare the cost of a foot of trench, so if it's X amount of dollars to trench on foot into the ground, you compare them at the same distance for an aerial network. That's of course a big difference because the aerial network has less equipment needs and less time spent, so the cost is typically lower. And that is the information that the COPSO fiber optimization engine will use to decide on certain aspects to make certain choices. Do I put the cable in the ground? Do I go over an aerial pole? So this is all important information that needs to be added and in my view is part of the input. If it's not correctly set, then the choices made by the software will not always be as you would expect. Then once all this is configured, so once you have defined the input, defined the natural architecture, it comes with fiber run calculation and this is the detailed output that comes out of that. So we have a high level bill of material and it shows how many homes you have, what is the cost for deploying fiber to all of these homes in total or individual. So this is the high level overview. But in also more detail, there's a full bill of material for each component. How many of these are needed? What is the cost for that specific component? And it's really easy to see the number of components that you need, number of meters of feet of trenching and so on. And this is needed. Another aspect that can be considered once you have run a calculation is the cost per address. So in this, yes, you can see a heat map with the green dots representing clients with a lower cost, orange a bit higher and red, of course, the highest cost for deploying that specific home. This is something that can be used in consideration. For example, in rural areas, those red clients could maybe be excluded from the full fiber of the home deployment and then be considered for alternatives such as a fixed wireless access. So that the cost for those specific clients is not too high. But the family home is really focused on the clients that have an acceptable cost and not the outliers. And then another deal of output that is shown here is a full connectivity. So this is a full tracing from a certain demand point all the way back to the central office over the cabinet. And all the connectivity is made. So it is possible to consider optical budget losses for equipments on the way and so on. So all of this is present in any calculation. And then the second image here shows the equipment needed. So splitters and cables and so on. You can view that on the map as I just showed in the Excel overview. This is really the geographical location of these components. And then once you have a design, it's still possible to influence design as a planner. So it's possible to change clusters, move cabinets, change certain rounds, change cable groupings, drawing and so on. So the flexibility is pretty high. And then once as a user of the software you have made some changes, it's then a matter of re-learning calculation. And the optimization will take the changes into account and optimize around these changes because they are overruling. These needs to be met and then the rest is considered as an optimization for software. But these specific changes that user makes will not be touched upon. So that was in general a high level overview of the advantages that we see in the software. So let's go in a bit more detail and go to the demonstration. So this show or you can see here the interface of network managers telecom. So the main view is that of Google Maps because that's one of the backdrops that we provide. You can view the geographical information on any background, but Google Maps is the one that's being used right now. Then on the left hand side, there are a number of layers that you can select from. I'll be showing in a minute and on the top is the operations that are possible with any rich data and to create new aspects. So if I go in a bit more detail, what I want to do here is go to create a console design. So we can choose this in the dialog above. Then zooming in a bit, you will see more data appearing. So this is the green dots on location of the homes where all the clients are located that they want to provide fiber to. And the black lines are the three center lines. So these are the lines that can be used as starting point. And I'm now drawing a polygon, which is the which will be the basis for a design. So I'm just saying these it's get perfectly 600 homes. The mall points will be designed for by making a new design for that and saving that. Then in a design, I'll make a workspace which allows for different scenarios. If you have different designers, you can make multiple work spaces in here. And then we will go to the automated steps. So a couple of the steps highlighted here. Well, there's a bit of data processing behind the scenes. So the first to the initialize and the populate will extract data from the IQgeo database and create this as a data package. Because it is sent off to a cloud server for calculation. And part of that is addition of data such as the street center lines that I just mentioned. These are the ones because you have both sides of the streets that allow for trenching. So we need to have that data that's being automatically generated as part of this. Also, each individual home will need the drop trench towards the streets. That's also being generated. You'll see it in a minute in the results. Then all of that is being sent off to a cloud server that's doing the calculation. This allows to have multiple users run calculations at the same time. So it's a queue mechanism. And if necessary, multiple machines can be booted up. And then most of the results are ready. This is directed back into the database and visualized on the screen. So this is the result. You see there's five cabinets that have been generated. And let's have a look at the below material. So as I briefly showed in the presentation, this is an Excel sheet showing the cost both in total. And then deployment cost for home is about on average $1,600. And there's also an activation cost. And then as mentioned, all of the individual layers are also shown in the overview. Then looking at the details, this is where you see how many tables, splices, cabinets and so on are necessary per layer. So distribution layer has five cabinets needed and about 600 splices to realize this specific network that we're seeing right now. So lots of information there, but let's go back and have a look at the geographical output. So zooming a bit, as you just mentioned, you can see the drop range. So that it range from the client to street. And this specific client has about $1 ,800 specifically allocated to this home. And then looking at the other one and its neighbors more than $3,000. The reason for that is that you see this specific trench on the street is only for that client. So the cost for trenching and cabling and so on is allocated only to that specific client. Whereas the first one, the cost to trench towards that one is specifically only for that. So that's why this one has a higher cost. Looking at the second one, we have some equipment here. So wall box and then the fibers being connected. To that you can trace these fibers. So this is a trace from the client all the way, as you can see upwards towards the first cabinet and then the central office. And you can see here that it runs first to the east and to the south. And the small circle in blue there. That's really the cabinet where the splices are being made. So this shows the connectivity authority there. So each client has a connection, has a cost. And you can check quite a lot more aspects than just this. But yeah, for the purposes of this webinar, I'll stop here and hand it over to James again. All right. Thank you very much Jeroen. So hopefully there that gives you a flavor of the user interface. That's network manager telecom that I was talking about at the beginning. And that the automated design part is where the ComSoft Fiver engine is working its magic, shall we say. And one of the things that we think about as IQgeo, as a company, we are a carbon neutral company. We have a certification around that. And that's something that's very important for us. And clearly that's something that's gaining in prominence as well within the wider industry. So reducing the carbon footprint across the network, both from a network deployment perspective. So some examples there, the fact that fiber is generally lower in energy consumption than copper networks, for example. Any opportunity to reuse existing infrastructure and optimize fiber utilization can reduce carbon footprint as well. Moving to fully digital operations. I don't think people print a lot of paper out nowadays, but it still occasionally happens. So making things far more digital and seamless can can help with that. And the last one, which is actually quite a big one, is reducing truck rolls. So both from a construction perspective. So if we're able to optimize the construction and also from an ongoing operational point of view as well. So from those sales and operations perspective, anything that we can do can reduce some truck rolls will help with overall carbon footprint. And as I say, this is something that we'll see increasingly, particularly actually, although we all focus at the moment quite a lot on the deployment of the network initially. And the end of life of equipment is a very important aspect. And can that equipment be sensibly recycled and all that kind of side of things is something that, again, is is well, that might be at the very end of the network's lifecycle. Thinking about that at the beginning can can help save those costs in the longer term as well and benefit the environment and stuff. So that's something that we often think about. So I promised on the next slide to to just come back to the other parts of the lifecycle and to just give you a little bit more of a flavour of the sorts of things that IQgeo can do within those parts of the lifecycle. So network build, network construction, so we've just seen from your room there, we created a design and clearly there's a large number of elements that need constructing there. I can't remember the number of optical splice closers off the top of my head, but it was a big number. And clearly that all needs to be managed. So with our workflow manager capability, what we're able to do there is to be able to automatically take that design and generate construction tickets effectively from the design in a configurable way based on your particular organization and setup. Those tickets can then be assigned to the different teams, the different crews that are doing the network construction. That is then available to the teams out in the field. So as they are doing the work, they can indicate that that work has been completed or indeed a supervisor can can do that. And that's all available for a very simple set of forms that are available on tablets or indeed on phones. So back to that mobility being sort of within our DNA, this is clearly an area that that we focus on as well. And being able to update that information out in the field is then enables that to be, you know, viewed and referenced back in the office so that you can understand how things are progressing from that build and being able to get an overview of that from a reporting point of view. And that in turn, obviously, in the big picture, you can understand how the different contractors who are undoubtedly doing this work on your behalf, how they perform in if there's bottlenecks in certain areas, what's what's some of the issues there. So having that data available and being able to to interact with that can support the ongoing improvement of that process. And of course, the final stage is often particular inspection processes, particular closeout processes that your organization follows and being able to automate and optimize those is very helpful as well. So if we move on to the next stage of the lifecycle, I talked a little bit about this, you know, in the beginning when I was running over the different stages within the lifecycle. And as I said, this is often looked at from a business to business perspective. So it's really about being able to respond quickly to these sorts of requests. So that's a number of different things to happen to start with. So eliminating requests that you're just simply not able to fulfill. I'm sure you've all seen situations where you get a request is just completely outside of your service area. And that can automatically be filtered out with a polite thanks, but no thanks. We can't offer that service there. One of the other key things is that that we typically see is that often these requests end up going to the engineering team who are trying to cope with the design work for their overall build. And then these additional requests come in. So being able to provide more capability to sales engineering teams who can do that work before it gets to the network engineer, network engineering team is very helpful and can help that team be a bit more self-sufficient. And then the requests that do end up with the network engineer, the specialists are the ones where it is actually required for them to review that. So this can be greenfield. It can be brownfield. You know, you get a request for information. Can you tell me how much it's going to cost to provide fiber to all of these cell tower locations that I want to offer service to that? Those kind of RFI type things that you get there and our capabilities able to help with those both off net and on net requests that you may receive. And the ability there as well to be able to influence the routing that's being taken. Perhaps you can go a slightly different route that allows you to capture some additional possible high value locations. So maybe you can go down the other side of the street and generate higher return on investment for that particular deployment that you can if you went down maybe the shortest path, but with lower long term revenue potential. And clearly a number of these things can be dealt with from a self service perspective. So being able to access this kind of capability via API so that your sales representatives sitting in front of the CRM system are able to get a quote back without needing to interact with the system and be able to get that information and streamline and automate that process as quickly as possible to remain competitive in a highly competitive marketplace. So that's around monetizing the network. And then if we look at the final stage is really around network operations. So here this really is around kind of forming a single pane of glass. So we've seen time and time again that having as much information about the network in a single view for the operations teams to be able to understand exactly what the network is doing in that spatial context. So remember, this is a very geospatial view of the world. We're looking at a map, we're bringing in information on various different aspects related to the network and overlaying that with that. What I said right at the beginning, that digital twin of the network. So being able to understand the network's location, its connectivity and then some of the operational metrics that are overlaid on that to be able to inform decision making. And then of course, taking that out into the field as well. So being able to ensure that teams in the field have got access to the most up to date information about the network. They can record any changes that they notice about the network if they've had to take remedial action to restore service that can be captured and fed back to teams in the office so that everyone has got as accurate and most up to date view of the current state of the network as possible. Maybe they, you know, notice some other issue with the network or maybe some data discrepancies and we can use the same workflow manager capability to be able to generate work tickets related to that work. What I will say though is we don't, we're not doing workforce management. So this is very much just tickets. So what we might do is we might integrate with a workforce management system. Indeed, we may see data coming from a number of different systems and we're presenting that in a single interface to the field team. So perhaps there's a, you know, a system that's a workforce management system that's doing the scheduling and routing. There's another system providing operational metrics. We could combine that information into a single ticket view that the user interacts with in the field and then updates are being propagated back to those kind of parent systems, if you like. But it's all about providing a more efficient experience for the end user. As I said at the beginning, we'll come back in a couple of weeks time and have a focus on the build stage with a follow on webinar as well. But hopefully that gives you a little bit of a flavor of some of the other capabilities within the broader portfolio that we offer. So I think that brings us to to the last slide and just trying to kind of wrap things up. So a few takeaways. We're looking at providing here a single interface to support that end to end workflow. You know, I've talked about that network lifecycle and how we can support different aspects of that. And that all is presented in a persona specific user interface geospatially based. The idea here is we're bringing data from a number of different places to avoid people having to swivel chair between different systems. It's presenting a more efficient and more usable experience for the end users. And we just talked about in the operate stage about bringing the field and the updates from the field as seamlessly and as dynamically into the environment, because we see that as being a key challenge for for operators and that bringing data together into a single view and a single platform really does foster that collaboration between teams. So everyone's working from the same solid understanding of what the network looks like. People aren't having to, you know, hunt around in different systems to look at different pieces of information and try and connect the dots if you like. So that all helps with that ability to more efficiently support that network lifecycle. So I think that brings us to the end of what we wanted to present. We've got a few minutes for questions that we can take. I can see there's been a few questions coming in through the through the chat there as well. So we can pick up a number of those, I think. Yeah, absolutely. We do have several questions that came in here. So to begin with, you talked about input data that is needed for a design is this data that you provide. Very good question. And no, we don't provide that data. So I think you mentioned through his presentation that we do provide Google as a background mapping. You can purchase that from us. You're free to use all the background map sources as well. And we commonly integrate with data providers as well. That could be mapping providers. So in the UK, an ordnance survey, for example, is a great example. But also that could be mobile mapping vendors. So, you know, there's a number of vendors out there who can capture that information using high resolution imagery and LIDAR. And then we can take the result of that and ingest that into our platform to then be able to use as the source data for the design process. So that actually relates to another question. We had somebody else who was basically asking if there are any detailed background maps available like Google. But they also mentioned OpenStreetMap. Do you know if that's supported? Yes, that's correct. You can configure the system to use OpenStreetMap. Yeah. Great. And let's see. So moving ahead here. We have a couple of questions just around how much control the designer has. So that's really the question is how much control does the designer have it? And then there's also some questions about the auto design as well. Yeah. So as I've shown in the demo, there's a ball. If you don't configure anything, the system will calculate the cost optimal network. But there are definitely various things that you can do to control this in terms of locking certain aspects. A typical example is the location of cabinets. That's normally placed about in the middle of the cluster of clients that it will provide. But if there's any reason why it shouldn't be, it couldn't be placed there. Like there's a tree or a monument or any other reason that it can't be there. It can really pick up the cabinets, move it 50 or 100 yards and plunk it down there and then rerun the calculation. So that's just one example. A couple of other ones are that the link between cabinets and a client. Can also be changed by an intuitive interface. So there's quite a bit of control and flexibility for the user. The design digest is just a starting point. And then a planner will go in there and validate all the possible scenarios and say this needs to be changed. This needs to be changed and that needs to be different. And then the real calculation with the advantage of for that within a matter of minutes, you have a fully new design. Containing all the details that I just showed. But of course, taking into account the user inputs that is there and has been changed by the automation. So you also briefly mentioned updating data in the field. Is that using a separate tool or is that integrated? No, that's that's fully integrated into the environment. So it's a we can provide a special app that runs on iOS, Android or Windows. And as I said, that offers the same capabilities if you were using a web browser in the office. I mean, you can use a web browser out in the field as well. But the the app offers you two things. It offers you enhanced interaction for your support in touch. And it also offers offline access as well. So clearly at some in some locations, network connectivity from wireless mobile providers is cannot be guaranteed, particularly in, you know, storm outage situations. And I talked about our utility customers right at the very beginning. That's clearly a very key requirement from a utility point of view. So that offline access that's provided by the the integrated field app. Okay. Let's see. So somebody's asking if you can give an outline of a splice package creation. Yeah. So there's I saw that question there. So, yeah, one of the things that we can generate is various reports. Obviously, in the in the time we've got available here, we can't get into some of those details flashing up reports all over the place. But yes, we can generate a report for an optical splice closure. We can show the connections that are required to to be made. It's a tabular type report that can be exported to various different formats as well. So you can use that as the basis for a kind of report pack job pack type output. Great. Let's see here. So somebody is asking how many images can be saved for location? Is there a data limit? And what features regarding asset tracking and buildings with floors? Yeah, there's a number of different things kind of wrapped up in there. And so if I understand the question correctly. So yes, we can access the camera on devices so we can record photos in there. There's no kind of limit on that. We're not a photo management system. We just store those images in the database. They're then available. They can be offloaded if you want to into your system of choice. I'm not aware of any particular limits with that. We don't, as I mentioned, in terms of mobile mapping, we don't handle directly high resolution 3D imagery and LIDAR. And we would integrate with a system to be able to embed that within our environment to visualize and that. But we'd leave that to a specialist vendors. And I saw a question about inside plan, which kind of relates to buildings and floors as well. So, yes, we can capture inside plan for more than cabinets and cross connects. And this is one of our great points of flexibility is that the flexible model that we can create. So you can create a model that reflects a building hierarchy with floors, you know, suite lines, the racks and the equipment within that and all of the connectivity across and between that equipment. And the interaction is very similar to what it would be as if it was a cabinet or a patch panel. It's just a larger volume. So, yeah, that's that's all fine. What we don't do just is we don't do floor plans. So we're not a BIM system. We're not a CAD system. We're not trying to manage all of those floor plans that you might see. Great. I believe you've already addressed this, but somebody is asking if there's a process to migrate existing data to the system. Yeah, I mean, getting data into the system from existing systems is something that we routinely do. And we've done that with lots of different systems, whether they be GIS based systems or other systems. Clearly, it all depends on the nature of that data and the quality of that data. Yeah, we've done that and we can use industry sort of standard tooling to do that as well. So that's certainly something that's not a problem for us to do. A couple more questions just about what input data you can use. Can data from fiber monitoring equipment be included? For example, during a faulting scenario, could the details of the fault be added to the IQGEO software? Yeah, that's a great question. And yes, that's certainly possible. And obviously, it depends what you want to do with that data. But a typical, a very simple scenario would be one where fiber monitoring system can generate a distance from an OTDR. And you can ask via an API. It's actually a telemanagement for a style API. You could ask IQGEO, where is that? And then we would be able to provide a response which contains both information about the network that's traversed, but also the actual end location of that fault. If you wanted to store that in IQGEO, then that would certainly be possible. Although not necessarily sure that in the long term, that's what you would actually want to do. It'd be more appropriate probably to integrate those systems. And is the data that generates the logic rules for IQGEO something handled by a company-side administrator, or is that put together by the company and then handed over to IQGEO to push to the system? So if I understand the question correctly, then that's something that you as the user of IQGEO are able to do. So we've worked very hard to make this as configurable as possible. And that configuration is not something that we have to do. That's something that you are able to. Obviously, you don't let every single user, given them access to configuration, that's more of a super user activity. And typically something that you would get training on and start of a deployment, then you'd be able to access that configuration. Yeroen showed a brief screenshot of the rules that drive the automated design. And there's a very extensive user interface that can be used to configure the rules for the automated design portion. So, yeah, that's all possible. And we also have a couple of questions just around digital twin. First, somebody is asking, what is your definition of digital twin? And at the same time, somebody is just asking if you can talk more about the digital twin topic. Yeah, so conceptually, we're representing the real physical network, you know, electronically, digitally. So we are providing a digital twin of the network. Obviously, that's a passive network. We can integrate. We just talked about integrating with test and measurement, fiber monitoring type systems. And we've done that with a number of our customers in the cable TV market as well. We've brought data in from cable modem monitoring systems and that kind of thing. So you can then take that information and visualize and see that alongside the network in a map. So that's why we refer to it as a digital twin of the network. Now, we're not it's not like a model of a gas turbine or something or a transformer where you're then able to change the operational parameters and see how that would impact the operation of the unit. But it is presenting you that a digital view of the network and the information around that that can support operations, which, you know, in general is a digital twin. All right. So here's a good one for you. What factors distinguish IQGeo from other GIS solutions? Yeah, that is a good question. So I think one of the key things is our architecture. So we are a truly web based solution. So it's fully deployable in cloud environments. We offer a SaaS based solution. So depending on the size of your organization, we can provide that as SaaS. If you want to run that in your cloud environment, then that's that's possible as well. So that's one key thing. I talked quite a number of times about mobility as well. So the fact that that is kind of truly integrated within the overall solution is another important aspect. And then I think the third one is that support across the network lifecycle. So we have capability across each part of the network lifecycle. Clearly, we saw the automated design with ComSoft Fibre today. But we also have, as I highlighted, solutions for the build, for sales and for network operations. So having that portfolio of capability that can offer right across that network lifecycle and network manager telecom underpinning all of that, I think is key differentiators. Absolutely. And, you know, we do have a lot of our members are in Latin America around the world here at FBA. And somebody is asking if the platform is applicable to customers in Latin America. Yeah, there's no there's nothing like special in there that is specifically limits it to be, you know, that means it wouldn't work in Latin America. We don't we don't have many customers in Latin America at the moment. The system is all globalized so we can translate that we already have translations into into French, German and Japanese. So translation is is not a hard thing for us to do. So that's certainly all possible. And yet there's no reason at all why it counts for operations in Latin America. Great. And, you know, we do have a few more in here. There's a few people who are asking about some of the resources that you showed specifically the, you know, for training and improving the usability. But I think those would probably be best answered offline here. And so with that, I just want to thank both you and your own. So James and your own. Thank you very much. This was great. Thank you IQGEO for providing the webinar. We definitely appreciate that as well. And any final thoughts, James, in your room? No, just to add my thanks as well to everyone who's attended. I hope that was useful. Obviously, it's hard to to give you a full picture in an hour. But thank you very much for all the questions that you submitted. They're very insightful as well. So hopefully we're able to provide some good feedback and interest there. And clearly we look forward to following up with you further in the future. Well, we will keep an eye out for the next webinar. And, you know, we look forward to that. And we look forward to seeing IQGEO at our regional shows that are coming up here. And so our next one is coming up in Deer Valley, Utah on June 4th. So definitely if you're in that area, please join us. And we'll be in Des Moines later in the year in September. In October, we are actually having our first regional Fiverr workshop up in Canada. So we're excited about that. And we'll be in Albuquerque, New Mexico to wrap up the year. And if you haven't done so already, but you want to participate in Fiverr Connect 2024 at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee, registration is open for that. So I encourage you to follow the link that we just posted in the chat or you can scan this QR code to get more details there. And with that, I just want to once again remind you to keep an eye out for future webinars and also a reminder that we have our Fiverr for Breakfast webinar every Wednesday, which is features Gary Bolton, our FBA president and CEO with a special guest each week. That's a little bit of a shorter format. So we look forward to seeing you on those. That's every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Eastern time. But thank you again to IQGEO and thank you all for attending today. We appreciate the time that you spend with us on these. And with that, have a great day. We hope to see you on the next one. Thanks.



