Future-proofing fibre: create certainty and enhance resilience

This year’s Connected Britain event takes place against a backdrop of rapid change and fierce competition in the fibre market, alongside the huge opportunities presented by Britain’s connectivity landscape. Success will lie in ensuring the resilience and future-readiness of fibre deployment, while expanding its reach to a broader customer base.

Fibre designers and alternative network providers (alt nets) are facing several complex challenges when it comes to future-proofing their assets. Emapsite will be at Connected Britain to explain how geospatial intelligence can provide the certainty to drive sustainable growth.

Meet us there at stand 126.

Understanding asset location

Today, a crucial aspect of future-proofing fibre networks lies in understanding the exact locations of the provider’s assets. In-house design teams and outsourced subcontractors need to understand not only where existing assets are, but also where future assets are going to be located.

Helpfully, geospatial intelligence provides additional data that enables fibre providers to understand the geography of and spatial relationships between assets. Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) link data to specific address locations, providing alt nets with visibility into premise-level information and enabling effective modelling and informed decision-making.

Environmental considerations

Naturally, managing the risks in fibre networks involves anticipating challenges posed by environmental factors such as flooding, high winds, and other weather-related events. Flooding, for example, can impact connectors, switch stations, and cabinets – even those built below ground. Land ownership is another key consideration.

Geospatial intelligence provides a single point of truth, combining an alt net’s own data with additional location and spatial data, resulting in a granular level of insight that enables informed decisions to be made at the planning stage.

Understanding the business impact

Alt net providers also need to ensure that new fibre deployments are commercially viable. Recently, the focus was on rapidly building and expanding fibre networks. Now, however, the emphasis has shifted to creating customer connections and retaining them to guarantee growth and revenue. To do that, impact assessments must take into account the broader business landscape and the commercial or residential opportunities in a prospective new area.

As many network providers are well aware, the critical details such as whether a building is listed or not, built more than 50 years ago and therefore potentially subject to asbestos, or a new build already supplied with full fibre, are just some of the considerations which can affect the viability of installing a fibre network, and can make the difference between having a customer or not.

Property intelligence, powered by geospatial data, can help alt nets in their business case analysis, network planning, and target customer profiling. Finding commercial opportunities is underpinned by data on who owns a particular building, how many businesses are based there and what they do, the number of employees, and annual turnover. It can even provide contact details at the appropriate level. Similarly, the sales potential of residential properties can be interrogated and understood, enabling sound, data-driven business decisions.