By employing a robust Geographic Information System to help manage, visualize, analyze, and understand the significance of recent geospatial data they’ve gathered, companies can gain enormous insight—actionable insight—for taking their business to the next level and beyond.

Three ways in which fresh and still-viable GIS data can be leveraged to provide enhanced benefits well beyond the deployment opportunity are:

Efficiency improvement

GIS data can be used helping technicians manage both their truck rolls and their on-site work. With live data on their tablet or smartphone, technicians can eliminate the frustration of dealing with a paper or CAD map—allowing them to explore the network in depth without needing to worry about whether they have the right sheet of paper or the correct information.

They can also adapt and make changes to the configuration or equipment immediately, keeping the information alive and updated, resulting in an accurate map detailing what actually transpired.

Communication enhancement

GIS data allows carriers to share construction activities, updates about outages, and information about new services via a map. And it can provide substantial benefit when it comes to pre-marketing new services or showing heat maps of pre-subscriptions as neighboring subscribers sign up.

OPEX and CAPEX monitoring

As assets are installed, finance managers can stay on top of the project’s budget by reviewing expenditures in real time. Additionally, updating Continuing Property Records (CPRs) and reporting accurately on what is actually being built and used is much easier using GIS data that is resident and easily accessible within the map.

The large-scale advantages that come with intelligently utilizing up-to-date geospatial data through a smart Geographic Information System can enable broadband providers to continue to bring fast and reliable service to their customers with greater efficiency, helping them visualize assets and value, streamlining and tracking each phase of their network implementation, improving decisions by using real-time data, and optimizing current and future broadband operations.

The big picture

From an historical perspective, the methods used for gathering, organizing, and accessing geospatial data in the development of broadband networks have often proven inconsistent and frequently unreliable, which has a profound effect on efficiency, planning, and budgeting. The data collected is often stale, disorganized, and unavailable to many of the people who need it most. In this type of environment, it’s understandable that projects that rely on this data frequently have trouble meeting milestones and are victims of cost overruns.

With the adoption of geographic platform technology, however, especially within an enterprise environment, a wide range of up-to-minute geospatial data can be quickly and efficiently collected and referenced, thus allowing all members of stakeholder teams access to accurate, comprehensive, and meaningful real-time data—on desktop PCs, and on tablets and other mobile devices. The improved performance and efficiency benefit all service provider teams and help ensure that broadband deployment projects can be delivered on time, on budget, and according to plan.