It is clear that the fibre-optic industry is undergoing a transformation from construction to management. The key to success in this lies in proactively monitoring and automating management processes.
Van der Pluijm asked about the particular challenges BAM sees in managing fibre networks for dark fibre operators and how they have now moved from reactive to proactive management.
According to Sander Grip, sales manager at BAM, in the ideal world, the customer would not even notice that there had been an outage at all. Whereas previously troubleshooting was a fairly intensive process, BAM has taken the step of proactively using fibre monitoring from @FiberFit. “We measure the performance of our clients’ network 24/7 via OTDR measurements. This way, we are proactively informed if there is increased attenuation or if a fault is measured somewhere. In that case, we can already proactively put the management organisation to work.
The technician can now remotely log into the OTDR and take a control measurement to determine exactly where the damage/damping is located. With this control information, Cocon Fiber can immediately see what work is being carried out there and, based on this, estimate what materials are needed. This increases customer satisfaction and network availability. This is achieved by shortening response times, lowering OPEX costs by reducing time and travel movements and reducing CO2 emissions.” says Grip. said Grip.
Jop van Veen, Manager of Business Excellence at BAM, latches onto the topic of how they deal with the various processes and information flows within their own organisation and with other stakeholders, and what role IT plays in this.
“We see that we have different types of flows within our management organisation. They can be failures, post-connections, patching etc. And all the ways of working are different. So how are you going to align that properly so that we collect the right information and give the right interpretation to it? Previously, we had to consult multiple systems separately. That is a thing of the past. With Gridsz, we now have a platform where we have all information at our fingertips. We have various branch sets at our disposal and can therefore indicate which branch set applies to each workflow. By setting up the process in this way, it matches our needs and the information we want to record.
