The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men... 

Ever feel like you are driving down the freeway at full speed, while trying to change a wheel and hook up a trailer at the same time? All while scheduling your next service and planning your next long drive? 

In the nonstop world of network management, you are often juggling the needs of longer-term plans with the everyday must-happen-now changes. If your current toolset for managing physical assets is not specifically built for this type of scenario, you can end up with complications like accidental outages and broken SLAs, as well as confusion working out what version of network you are looking at.  

One of the unique challenges for the network owner is managing the expectations and changes amid changing timelines, the implementation and deployment can easily take weeks, have unforeseen delays, and change course due to changes outside of the control of the project.  

Here’s an example scenario: 

The plans and designs have been prepared for a backhaul linking a new OLT back to a Hub site, which use some spare fiber in existing cables and some existing ducts for cables. The parts and materials are available, and the teams are ready to go, however a particular permit that is required is sitting on a desk in a local government office waiting for someone to come back from holiday leave. The project is on hold.  

Meanwhile if a truck hits a roadside cabinet and there is an outage that affects key customers, there will be a need to restore services ASAP.  

This restoration may involve some use of spare / dark fiber to re-route services around a problem area. If the re-routing is happening in the same area as the backhaul design above, we have a data conflict between the longer-term term planning and the day-to-day changes and maintenance. If the emergency restoration cannot see the future designs and ends up using the same spare fibers that were earmarked for the design… what happens when that permit gets approved and the construction and splicing starts?  

The concepts of version control are familiar to many, the basic “check-out update check-in” version control can ‘kind of’ work, in small teams with some good processes and ‘data Police’ to monitor what is going on. But the limitations of ‘check-out update check-in’ become apparent when organizations and the network they managed starts to grow. If you are outsourcing the designs and plans and the system is not aware of the daily changes happening, these longer-term plans can go ‘stale’ and need to be redone, or worse can cause outages when implemented.  

SpatialNetworX have tools that allow the long-term plans and designs to exist and continue without interfering with the day-to-day operations. The version control has been designed specifically to manage the short term ‘must do now’ and longer term ‘future plans'. 

In our scenario above, at restoration time the person using the spatialSUITE platform is able to check all the future plans in the re-route area, they can see the fibers in a cable that have been flagged or reserved for future use. The software can help avoid the potential conflict just by providing more visibility of the future. 

What happens if the restoration does override the fiber reservation and use the spare fiber (or the reservation had expired)?  

All is not lost. In spatialSUITE the designer of the longer-term plan will get a message saying that the baseline on which the plans and design were made has been updated, and the user is guided through a set of steps to ‘refresh’ the future design and select different spare fibers for the backhaul. 

SpatialNetworX provides flexible tools that are built for the real-world complex scenarios of the telco industry. Contact us to find out more. 

The best laid plans of mice and men, often go askew… (translation R Burns To a Mouse )