Accurate documentation of outside plant facilities in a Geographical Information System (GIS) is critical for telecom service providers in order to quickly and reliably locate their assets for maintenance and repair purposes. Underground assets such as fiber optic cable get cut frequently. These cuts can be very difficult to locate, especially when such facilities extend over long distances. The problem is compounded when the asset is not documented with respect to surrounding geography and when the information about the relevant area of interest is not quickly accessible through a software tool. This can result in prolonged loss of service to customers and substantial loss of revenues to the service provider.

An outside plant asset and facilities management GIS can also serve as a powerful tool for planning new deployments and extending existing plant. Network planning and design groups can be well served by the ability to design several alternate cable routes and link topologies and evaluate these options with respect to their cost and coverage area.

Large carriers often have a variety of outside plant including optical fiber, copper (coaxial, telephony last mile and transmission), WiMAX and cellular network infrastructure. A carrier may require the flexibility to have an integrated view of all outside plant along with the ability to manage the various networks independently.

Palmchip has developed a product which provides outside plant asset documentation for fiber optic, cellular, WiMAX, cable and copper networks. It has a network management module that can act as a manager of managers (MoM) or interface with an existing MoM for getting network fault information. This fault information is made visible on the GIS. Network asset information in the GIS can be synchronized with the configuration information in network management systems. On field device integration helps rapidly locate faults in fiber optic networks