Unlock the true potential of an optimized fiber network management solution.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for today's Fiber Broadband Association webinar. Today's webinar, Top 5 Benefits of an Optimized Fiber Network Management Solution is presented by IQGeo. I'm David Norris, Webinar Producer and Virtual Event Operations Manager for FBA. Before we begin, I have just a few housekeeping items which will ensure that you have the best experience during today's webinar. So first and foremost, if you haven't joined one of our webinars before, it's worth pointing out that all of the attendees are in listen-only mode. However, we will be having a Q&A session at the end and we encourage you to ask questions for that. And to ask questions, you'll notice that there's a small control panel on the side of your screen and you'll see that there's a question box where you can type your questions and we certainly look forward to seeing those questions and comments and responding to those. Also, we don't have any handouts in this particular webinar, but watch for a follow-up email. In that post-email, we'll have some of the resources that were talked about. And finally, all of our webinars are available on demand for replay following the live webinar. That is available for our FBA members. If you are a person with a member company and you don't already have a login for our website, near the end, I will post the link where you can go to create those credentials for our website and access all of those replays. And included in those replays, by the way, is our past webinars by our presenters today at IQ.GO. And so with that, I just want to briefly introduce our speaker and the conversation for today. So fiber operators, an optimized network solution can really turn challenges into business opportunities. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. Unfortunately, as many of the people on the call today probably know, many of those network management solutions, they lack network-centric architecture and all the efficient workflows that would allow you to get the most out of your network data. And so I'm delighted to have Seth join us today, Seth Strayer with IQ.GO. He's a solutions engineer. And Seth is going to share the top five reasons for fiber operators to invest in an optimized digital fiber network management solution. And so with that, I just want to hand things over to Seth. So Seth, take it away. Well, thank you for the introduction. And thank you to the Fiber Broadband Association for allowing us to present today. I'd also like to thank a number of our customers that have reached out to me in advance of this to congratulate me or wish me well. I do appreciate that. To introduce myself, my name is Seth Strayer. I am a solutions engineer with IQ.GO. And I've been in the communication space for just under 30 years. But I've been selling fiber management software for this will be my 21st year. So I'm really excited to have this conversation and any follow-up if you guys have any questions as it relates to fiber management or workflow. At the end of the presentation, I'll have a slide that has my contact detail if you want to reach out. So in this presentation, I'm going to discuss the top five benefits of network management solution from my perspective as a solutions engineer and selling fiber management software into customer networks that are really diverse. Everything from traditional telecom cable utility to a lot of power, I'm sorry, municipalities and then obviously fiber to the home network. So we've covered the gamut. So certainly all the things that you would assume about a digital twin are valid from a management perspective. And I'll address the typical drivers for implementing a system of record. Because we offer a comprehensive fiber network management system as well as add-on tools, we're often approached by companies that are looking for planning and design, planning and design platform. And I've always been a huge advocate of keeping everything in a single platform, not only because it adds organizational structure, but also for the benefit of having that repository and the amount of data that you're going to collect through that workflow and having that all condensed in a single location is really valuable. Networks grow. love הת go to you. There's two figures. As a broader Yeah. And what's overlooked in that process is the management of tracking those statuses, as it's often a manual process. When you incorporate digital ticketing into your workflow, it becomes a forcing function to ensure that progress is updated, that you're able to see it, that it becomes less of a management issue. This in itself yields a whole matrix of analytics that provide the ability to make micro adjustments to workflow that can be incorporated quickly to improve the end-to-end workflow. Having the ability to relate all of this information to a single network element adds to that value. What makes all of this possible in a single platform for all of these workflows and diverse job requirements? And really the answer to that is the persistent access to information through mobility. So being able to have access to the same information in the field that you have on your desktop to be able to contribute from a mobile device in the field is certainly what makes IQgeo unique, but as a proven workflow. With that, I think we have a poll question. That's right. We just opened that poll. And so we'd like to know what takes most of the time for you to manage in your network today. And I don't see we don't have an all of the above, but that should probably be there. But obtaining and sharing the most current data, planning and design, determining the best sales opportunities, managing construction tickets, or field updates. All right. I'm going to go ahead and close that poll. Get your answers in quickly. I will close that poll now and we'll have a look at the results. And so you should see those results here now. So it looks like planning and design appears to be the big time consuming activity. There, Seth. So any insight based on that feedback? Yeah. I mean, that's where everybody's at these days is with all of the build that's happening, obviously getting that build ready, being prepared for the construction is generally the largest time resource in the process. So as we talk about the benefits of a fiber management system, the first point that I like to make is the importance of being able to incorporate the system of record or your fiber management system and make sure that it's a commitment. Fiber management is one of those tools that you'll only get out what you put in. And the more you put in, the more value of what you'll receive coming out of that. So the benefit here is by making your fiber management system part of your daily operations, it does force discipline on the employees, but ultimately that should result in a lot of things. And staff buy-in and a shared point of pride and ownership. What I've seen in my experience is once customers have started the deployment of a fiber management system, they not only have buy-in to the network, but they understand how the network works and they're able to communicate that effectively because they have both a purpose-built tool that shows them all of their connectivity and structural locations. And they can use that to communicate with others. And I find that one of the things that I often counsel customers is not to adjust your workflows based on the capabilities of the fiber management system. Your fiber management system should be able to mold to your will. So it's not to say that you won't have to change your workflows, but you'll likely change your workflows based on the efficiencies that you gain through implementation of your managing system. So as I stated in the first slide, networks tend to grow. There's been very few instances in my career where there's a purpose-built fiber network that remains static. And change management, being able to communicate change management across the organization, whether it's through network operations, customer support, defining your maintenance windows, having the ability to track anything that changed in the network and then have a historical view to see what the impact of that is. A tenant of your fiber management system should be the ability to identify a fault location. Typically this is done in concert with an OTDR meter where you'll troubleshoot to an outside plant fault. You'll then do an OTDR trace or if you're fortunate and have a remote fiber test system that's associated to that fiber, that span, you'll take those trace results and you should be able to plug them into your fiber management system to identify the fault location. But you should never have to think WTF. What's WTF? It's probably not what you think it is. Where's the fault? So now we have the ability to isolate a fault location to a particular area and have all the associated information about not only the cable or the assets involved, but also any relevant spares. And then be able to visually see and potentially reroute if possible. So you can see that at least understand the depth of a fault on a particular cable span. What services are affected by that particular outage and what other customers may be affected by a break on a cable or a flooded access point or a traffic accident involving a pole with your cable on it. So SLA assurance, this is probably more appropriate for the traditional telecom networks or CLEC networks, but we're seeing a lot of this with ISPs as well, fiber ISPs, where initially the bill plan was to provide residential services. residential services that's gone extremely well. They start to then offer commercial services. This is another tier of revenue service that they can provide through SLA or service level agreements. Oops. I think I'm one click behind. Sorry about that. So being able to identify circuits or lit fibers that carry service level agreements will help you avoid any of the potential penalties or loss of revenue due to an outage. And then that same vein, the kind of combining these three things together, the ability to do any type of impact analysis. If I have to move a particular cable or splice enclosure to a different location, I now have the ability to to determine what the impact of that would be on the network and test it before I even try to implement it in the field. This can be downstream, upstream customers that might be affected by a topology change within the network. Obviously, sales enablement is probably not what we're here for today, but this is a natural follow-on to to this where now you've documented all of your fiber network. It's in a single repository. You now understand and have the ability to report on fiber utilization. So now you can see geographically where you have available resources to sell and we'll touch base. We'll spend some more time on sales enablement as we progress through the demo. Vulnerability analysis. This has been a hot button topic for our CELAC customers lately where they're providing a combination of service level agreements. So they want to be able to determine where they're vulnerable in their network. And this can be as simple as diverse path entries and single point of failure analysis that they can do spatially. Market valuations are a little bit different. So this is the value of your network beyond the subscribers that you have today. So with a combination of geodemographic information, you can combine that, see what you're available, determine what your available total bandwidth is or your geographic reach to serve particular customers or groups. So the value of the market is beyond what you have in terms of current subscription, but the reach of that market. Regulatory reporting. Regulatory reporting. This is what I've seen from a lot of customers or from what I've heard before they implement a system like ours. Regulatory reporting is very difficult. be I would extend this to also locate reporting so what information do you provide to your locate firms or your call before you dig 811 services and being able to output this regularly as your network grows you should have incremental updates that you're providing to your locate services and this is just part of the continuity of running a network and the last point on on this particular slide is preserve network knowledge often especially in small small networks you'll have a couple of key stakeholders they build it they're really intimately aware of the network but as those networks grow and those positions change you won't you won't have the access to that organic memory that you would on your start day so being able to to preserve that network knowledge and a common platform that also increases visibility of that data across the organization is incredibly valuable so now I want to transition a little bit and talk about the benefits of accelerated planning and design so every network is unique it's it's unlikely that you're going to build a network that somebody else has the the exact same idea and that's everything from workflows to to product that you use in the field and again here I like to emphasize that your workflows shouldn't necessarily be changed by your fiber management system but your fiber management system should be able to accommodate those workflows and that would make the the fiber management system easier to implement and operationalize having the ability to plan design and manage in a single application brings a lot of benefit from the IQ Geo perspective one of the ways that we enhance that is we support design state modeling so this allows you to segment any of your work in progress from uh from your production or your as built network so what you're doing in in the system is uh both visually um separated from your production network as you take it through that the workflow uh process of plan uh from that plan should output or or be available as a high level design where engineering can then take that over or you can take that over or refine that to something low level constructible and then make it available to uh to construction and maintain it in a design state and as as it's in that design state use that to manage the project so um you can set statuses for um a design and track its workflow and progression as it's being built a huge part to to what we have to offer is the ability to collect data from anywhere at any time and anytime you go to the field there's an opportunity to to get data and this can include everything from pre-construction survey to to post-construction as built so as you're you're doing your field walkout you're doing that within your fiber management system all the data that you're collecting on on your mobile device is then pushed to the system where uh you can then incorporate that as as a part of your design and for us the there isn't prince and and uh former feature of the application so if you're on a mobile device or or accessing the system through a web browser in your office you have the same view so it's uh so it's not a tailored down or watered down version of of the application for mobility it's as much of the the application uh that you want to to bring to the field uh tied to design state modeling um is is also the ability to generate a detailed build materials like that considers both labor and material costs so now that's encapsulated in and what's effectively a a project folder and you can use uh the system to uh prospect or plan and develop a high level uh cost to build and then as you continue the the workflow you can compare that to what the actual costs were so from your initial plan uh and design estimate uh versus actual construction and this is this is really important data to have because then you can take the the delta there and refine your cost in your fiber network management system so the result of of every completed project should add accuracy to those cost estimates as you go based on uh your real world results david i think i'm gonna pause here and i think we have another poll uh that's right we do i'll fire that up here and so we're uh interested in what are the biggest challenges uh with marketing and selling your network slow manual processes um to produce sales quotes dependence on engineering time and cost the inability to quote accurately lack of effective uh crm integration and low win rates on rfps so what are some of the challenges that you're facing here uh it looks like we have uh uh quite a bit on the manual processes uh concerns and of course uh engineering time and cost is always concerned as well well you guys are teeing this up for me today this is awesome yeah so this is this is something that um you'll find typically in more mature networks so part of that is now you have a spatial record and because it's spatial you can provide any collection of geodemographic information and create maps like the ones that i'm showing now where where the the linear objects with the lines on the map represent uh fiber cables um and they're color coded based on utilization so now i can see where my my available uh fiber is and then to that i've added geodemographic detail that identifies customer locations and that becomes a heat map so the customers are graded based based on temperature closest closer they are to the network the uh the redder they are and so that tailors out to um cooler colors as as they get further away from the customer but in terms of sales enablement once you have this data you can now see where the customers are and how you're going to serve them what the available assets are and from the the sales perspective this gives you confidence that as i go to a customer i'm not going to have that that lag between submitting a cost estimate as i build my business case to be able to to to close a particular customer now i know or i have some assurance where i've pre-qualified customers based on their location and proximity to available fiber near net analysis can also extend to your on net off net um there's there's a number of different scenarios but one of the scenarios that um i like to review or or put out there is kind of a the build buy scenario where you might have off net buildings where you're buying service from uh a partner company uh to to provide service to to your customer as your network grows over time you may be within that customer that that off net customer may not be serviceable and and running a report on a regular interval to determine what off net customers could be easily served from uh as as on net customers is the type of of reporting that our customers typically do so a lot of this boils down to opportunity qualification so uh it's it's natural for for sales people to to take the the fastest path to ground right so now if you can pre-qualify those opportunities so they're talking with customers that one you know are serviceable two are within proximity to your network so building the business case to serve those customers uh is is somewhat streamlined uh and from the engineering perspective you have those same qualifications like i know that i have available fiber they're within proximity to to what i've determined as a an available access point or or a point where i can bring them onto the network and from the construction side all of those things are are yet again validated and because you've been there because you've already collected the data those those engineering processes are are also shortened so you have that data in your system you've already done a site survey you've built to that particular area so um you're you're way ahead of the uh uh the the normal process so the the next point is avail or bandwidth availability and this can be this can take the shape of of actual bandwidth it could be you know reserve capacity off an OLT port it could be dark fiber whatever that that case is sometimes you you'll have customers that are in uh approximation to an available fiber but they may not be the ideal customer is it is it uh worth more to pass on a particular customer because they would be using a valuable fiber resource um so those are the types of of evaluations that you can make and and pre-groom that sales effort and that ties in nicely with uh with what i was just saying in terms of of customer ranking so in addition to capacity evaluation being able to to pre-identify customers by business type or bandwidth demand all of that information is relevant to uh to the process as well within iqgeo we have a tool um for pre-construction cost estimation so this is a kind of a long term for what is effectively a sales enablement capability that will focus your sales efforts for maximum benefit this provides the the ability for your sales group to self-qualify opportunities without having to engage with planners or engineering and is a massive efficiency gain once your sales team is is confident that uh the result of this uh pre-construction cost estimate is something that they can actualize and build their business case around uh for uh before they submit it to engineering from the the other side of that from the engineering perspective this alleviates a lot of those cost requests so what we've seen as a typical workflow is sales has an opportunity they send a request to engineering that request sits at engineering and i've literally seen a lot of the time that we've seen stacks of requests over a foot and a half tall uh within an engineering department and each one of those requires an engineer to review or develop a cost or quickly qualify so all of that time is spent for what is essentially a sales responsibility um so our our network revenue optimizer tool uh becomes the front front end or an integrated component with a crm where you can plug in an address and this will give you a a cost to build result for that particular address so that's great for one-off but often uh sales opportunities come in multiple locations uh this would allow you to to quickly qualify those say for example a a franchise or or some type of um uh multiple site location customer like a cell phone carrier comes to you and they they ask for a quote uh to provide service to all of those sites this allows you to quickly qualify each one of those build a business case for the whole so um develop a cost structure for ones that are closer to network versus ones that are further away to capture more of that that business also you might have a sales person that's active in a particular area and you want to see the results of of uh each of his opportunities um summarized as a single project so by by by taking those customers and clustering them uh you'll now be able to share the cost of the build across all of those customers and again all of this is done without having to engage engineering until the the sale reaches a point of maturity where they come back to engineering and say okay we're we're close to contract we'll need to have this built soon uh you guys pick it up from here and then again all of this is data so you may have you know hundreds of of opportunities that pass through the system if you're building 10 of those are doing really well but now you have 90 percent uh now you have data points for 90 of the customers that are serviceable in or within proximity to your network so again as your network changes you can rerun those aged uh opportunities through uh our network revenue optimizer application and determine the cost so it might not be a good time to build uh to those customers now but maybe in two years as the network is expanded they become cherry-picked opportunities that you can uh that you can leverage the the next part or the next benefit that i'd like to explore is workflow management and really this is the process of of how do you uh formally communicate the detail of a design to to construction and again leveraging the ability to do this through a mobile application is is really powerful so if if you're interested in construction management or project management anything that that revolves around uh new construction ads moves changes break fix uh type of ticketing uh we have a platform that can be integrated with the system of record uh to do exactly that so we can um we can take the result of a design uh and either automatically create tickets or manually create tickets have an interface or a dashboard to present that detail review all of the tickets um so if you're if your workflow is you know construction management obviously part of that is the uh project management and keeping track of the statuses of of each element as it's being built um and that they can be all all ticket based now so not only do you have an object record you have a ticket record for that and then the ability to uh to close out that that inspection um so once your contractors or your field teams are done uh a final kind of as-built state to go ensure that it's built to your standards that there aren't any uh noticeable construction defects that all of your your test results are are collated and condensed back to the object that they were either the picture or the the picture was taken of uh or the ports that the the tests were taken from and ultimately this provides the the end-to -end oversight that a lot of you guys spend most of your time doing uh through the build process uh the process um and then lastly the the progress reporting is is critical um but being able to tie all of that back to your plant record uh is incredibly valuable and this is that again that the amount of data that you're building through that design uh construction phase all relates back to your system of record so a lot of evidence and can be done from your system of record or fiber management system as all of that information is condensed and this is in how everybody implements fiber network management systems over the years we've had people use it for uh very specific purposes like they just want to use it for splicing or um they're just tracking their fiber connectivity and they they're less concerned about the uh the underlying assets and then i would say 80 percent of our customers um use use more of the application to to document all of their infrastructure and connected um inventories within our platform so keeping it brief uh last slide is really all about mobility uh for us this is certainly a distinction in the market and that all of all of your information wherever you are is now available to you if you need disconnected access if you're working on a rural fiber building you don't want to print out a bunch of detail um you want to take everything on a tablet or potentially your phone we provide uh disconnected access where you'll download an extract of your network take that onto the field if you don't have service you'll log all the changes on the device when you return to coverage area those changes will then sync back to your production it's incredibly valuable and that not only are you just take you're not just taking the information for the job but once you get to the site you may need other detail that you don't have so that's either a re-trip or get somebody to send it to you drive back to coverage area to receive it those types of things so having everything uh available the the same same system available that are you would use in your office is now available in the field uh and again extends to uh your workflows and processes and and uh how you communicate that detail within the organization so to that point uh we kind of kept this short that's um uh essentially my presentation but we are available for uh q a so if you guys have any questions um i would love to to uh uh be able to take this time and make it maybe more useful for you that's right we do have some questions come in and i know that uh we also have uh crawford uh with uh iqgeo who's i'm going to go through uh some of those here so uh crawford yeah david can you hear me yes we can hear you fine great i'll start we've had several questions come in so seth the first one is how do you get data into a fiber network management platform that's a great question yeah so we spend um we've spent traditionally a lot of time working with customers to do exactly that we have a professional services team so depending on the the form of of your existing documentation we strive to programmatically import that data where possible but we also have a team of of uh data technicians that can take whatever information you guys have and push that into uh your network management system or or in our case network manager telecom we also provide the ability to bring in other data sources within uh network manager telecom a lot of that is available to the to the customer from through the front end of the application so if you want to relate maybe a parcel uh or a shape file of parcels within your footprint you can upload that and add that as a feature to your network manager instance okay and i think i'll jump ahead to this one because it's a little bit related can you convert existing kmz files to iqgeo yeah for sure so kmz is uh is a great uh file format for communicating data unfortunately it's it's not super accurate so what what i generally recommend is convert it to shapefile ideally geojson but in shapefile format that then standardizes the the geometry and then you can do a bit of uh cleanup so what what i mean by cleanup is is ensuring that lines are snapped to points like you might have a fiber cable that's associated to a pole line to make sure that the the cable snap to the the points so you have a a solid result when you import that ultimately into network management okay great uh this is a mobility question does your mobile platform support apple or android it does in fact it supports uh both of both apple uh ios and android as well as uh windows okay uh this would be for the the workflow management section so can my contractors have access to ticketing and how do they get access to to those tickets oh yeah yeah great question so the the way that that traditionally works is uh your your contractor would have a license um and you would again define the role of what they have access to what they have the ability to edit uh and then they would be able to receive if if you're using construction management they'd be able to receive tickets on that mobile device but also they would have access to your network uh data so any splicing cable placing pull attaching all that information would be available in the app and then when they're done with the app you can either reassign that license or uh just not renew it uh in the following term okay um next one is will this work with our gis that's a that's also a great question so it will within within at least from our perspective from the iq geo perspective we store everything to ogc or open geospatial compliance um so the data record is is gis ready and then it's just a matter of of how you connect to that data source whether we output from uh the front end of our application or uh if if you have access to a database backup where you can consume that data within your gis and that's a typical application for us where customers um especially cities and municipalities will have a larger infrastructure data set that they manage within a gis platform providing them the ability to consume the data from uh network manager allows the users to have a really easy to use purpose-built front end but maintains the fidelity of that gis data to complete the workflow as it's being published or consumed by your gis crew all right next up we have a design question can you export a design to autocad so directly from the application you can export a design to a dxf file but again um because the data is built uh or stored to ogc compliance you could also connect um an autocad client to a backup of your database and consume the entire thing so there's a couple of different workflows uh i think we're also working on workflows where we incorporate fme so you could have fme triggers um to pull data from your your network manager database and drop into a format that you could then uh easily work with and can all right and i apologize if i have a little trouble reading this one uh my my reading pane is a little small but it says uh so if i understand this correctly i can use the data to provide to the company that does our fcc filing and also the line and access point data to our locate company usic yeah absolutely that's and that should be the intent so if if you're contracting out your regulatory reporting all of that data should be sourced from your system of record and from what i understand those uh the the accuracy of those reports um the the qualifier there has increased so i think you're providing um fiber fiber placement accurate within seven and a half meters something like that um and and your system of record should be at least that accurate uh so being able to pull the data from our platform to to provide to regulatory is really just a simple export and the same thing for any of your underground infrastructure uh to output to uh your your locate company okay david i think that is probably good for us so i don't know if you want to maybe move to seth's final slide with his contact information and then i'll hand it back over to sure that sounds great and i will just uh fire that up here um so thank you seth and and crawford and the rest of the iqgo team and of course thank you to all of our attendees here today too um like i said watch for that post webinar email email where there will be uh some links to different resources so that you can continue to learn more about uh optimizing your your network management solution so with that i just have a couple of quick announcements and then we will wrap things up a little bit early here so first and foremost we have our regional uh fiber connect workshops coming up here we have our schedule uh set for uh for 2024 so we're very excited about that and look forward to seeing everybody there i will be kicking things off in richmond virginia on february 8th um so uh put that one on your calendar and uh shortly after that we will have um uh in april we'll be at little in little rock arkansas uh deer valley utah a little bit later uh early summer and then we'll be in des moines iowa and albuquerque new mexico uh in the second half of the year so i'm definitely looking forward to seeing everybody there and in the meantime if you want to join more of our webinars um we would certainly love to uh to have you do that so visit our website and um go to the webinar section and you'll be able to to access both uh our current webinars as well as the past webinars uh past webinars uh are available to fba members uh only so uh just be aware of that if you don't already have credentials on our site like i said go and hit that login button and uh you'll be given the opportunity to create an account on our website uh if the organization you work with is an fba member and last but certainly not least i want to point out that we have our fiber for breakfast series every wednesday at 10 a.m eastern time and that features our own uh gary bolton our president and ceo and so please add that to your calendar like i said every wednesday at 10 a.m we'd love to have you join us there too and with that i just want to say once again thank you everybody for uh participating today uh we appreciate your time we know uh you all have busy schedules so i certainly appreciate you being here and uh again i want to extend uh my thanks to to seth and crawford and the rest of the iqgeo team uh for uh providing this great information today thanks and have a nice day thanks david david thank you we'll also be at those those fba webinars it's a great they're great shows and uh if you're if you have the option please come by and say hi great great well we uh uh look forward to uh seeing you there and like uh seth said stop by that iqgeo booth thank you again everyone thanks guys