Get tools to streamline daily tasks between different divisions
Detect, troubleshoot, and resolve issues. Make changes to your fiber network and connect new customers. Analyze capacity and bottlenecks, and manage your inspection rounds. With an established operational network in dpCom, you can rest assured that you get an up-to-date, complete representation of your fiber network to perform your daily tasks.
Fault and outage management
Most of the issues, faults, outages, or changes in the operations of a communications network are handled in the active equipment, and thus in the relevant OSS/BSS. But many problems will concern the physical fiber network.
dpCom enables you to efficiently manage issues, outages, and faults, whether planned or unplanned. The fault and outage management module is used by the NOC, customer service desk, and fiber network planners. It enables you to pinpoint faults, analyze customer impact (including SLA levels), and send notifications to customers. The customer help desk can see if a calling customer is part of a known fault/outage and immediately get relevant information on the current status and plans for restoring service.
The system gathers all the statistics you need for reporting to authorities and regulators.
Changes in the fiber network
A network change could be anything from making a midspan in a manhole to moving a cross-connection node to a new location. In either case, dpCom provides several functions that make this work more reliable and efficient.
fiber network changes are always done in a two-step approach. In the first step, all changes are stored in the database as a change set (known as a long transaction). This means the user can change the fiber network without any effect on the master data. The user can analyze the changes, simulate behavior, and do peer review to be sure the fiber network will be in good shape after changes are made.
Based on the fiber network represented in the change set, all of blueprints for the real work will reflect the as-planned network. Changes will be posted as soon as they are physically performed, keeping documentation always up to date.
dpCom can efficiently manage many routine, real-world operations. For example, a midspan dpCom basically contains a sequence of three commands. The cover of the cable is cut (including an automatic creation of a splice box), then a number of fibers are cut, and finally some or all of those fibers are spliced to some or all of the fibers of the incoming cable.
Customer connections
Connecting a single new customer is very different from a larger building project. The process needs to be streamlined and relies heavily on detailed knowledge of the affected parts of the network. Several dpCom tools assist the people involved in this process.
Finding the shortest path with available resources between the new customer node and the applicable meet-me point is done in a single command. If a fiber- or copper-level connection can be established using patching, a dedicated tool can accomplish this step-by step in one GUI. If a connection is specified to be made as a redundant pair, the second part is verified interactively while building and/or as a verification command.
Capacity and bottleneck analysis
Objects like cables can be analyzed for available capacity. On the map, this analysis is shown using colorization or in tabular format. The path and connection finder described above can be combined with capacity analysis to understand the real capacity potential between parts of the fiber network.
Maintenance – scheduled and ad-hoc inspections
Use the dpCom inspections module to manage all types of inspections, from regularly scheduled inspections of certain equipment types (UPS, manhole lids, poles) with well-defined questionnaires to ad-hoc reports on problems detected during other field work activities. In both cases, the reports are created in a structured way, actions are defined for fixing problems, and the inspection results are searchable and available for planning further work.
You can make an inspection part of a planned inspection round, which includes tasks, activities, resources, and responsible persons.
