Telstra enables enterprise wide access to network asset information and extends up-to-date asset information to field crews
Telstra, Melbourne Australia

Business Challenge
Telstra is Australia's largest telecommunications company providing a complete range of telecommunications products and services. The company's fixed line telephone network extends across Australia and serves virtually all Australian homes and most Australian businesses.

Telstra maintains a corporate network infrastructure system called Cable Plant Record (CPR). This is a business critical spatial database that records every conduit, cable, pit, pillar, and associated asset installed by Telstra anywhere in Australia and is constantly updated. For field crews, Telstra issued snapshots of the CPR plans on microfiche. This workflow of producing and distributing microfiche to thousands of work crews was very expensive, lacked currency and was difficult to maintain. Furthermore, the microfiche were awkward to view in the field.

Along with a desire to upgrade from CPR to CPR2 Telstra wanted to address some of these drawbacks with the CPR system and decided to leverage the extensive experience of Geomatic Technologies (GT) in enterprise level spatial and mobility solutions.

Solution Overview
GT developed an innovative intranet solution known as Graphical Data Delivery (GDD) that published the CPR spatial data set to Telstra staff throughout Australia via a web browser.

The GDD solution incorporates Autodesk's MapGuide technology to allow users to search and zoom in on physical assets by entering a telephone exchange, feature ID or street address.

Additionally, the solution leveraged GT's FMC or Field Mobile Computing solution to enable users to take a cut of network data onto mobile devices. Users utilise the GDD intranet application to define an area of interest and then download that map to mobile devices using the CDMA/GSM (2 different communication standards) network.

Using a mobile device, users are able to view and query full network asset details including attribute data and make mark-ups of any works undertaken in the field. These mark-ups are then uploaded to the GDD desktop planning map and a workflow is initiated to review, approve and update core corporate CPR data sets.

The nationwide vector-based data used by GDD is tiled and updated nightly from the corporate GIS or Geographic Information System (GE's Smallworld) to ensure data currency.

Outcomes

• GDD has improved the access to and visibility of CPR2 data across the organisation. The survey delivered an improved knowledge of school safety speed zones and safety infrastructure.
• GDD helped to improve the productivity of field crews by giving them access to up-to-date asset information and allowing them to mark-up changes using a mobile device while in the field.
• GDD promotes more informed decision making in the field as data currency for field crews has been greatly improved. 

Images above from left to right
Fibre optic cable. A telecommunication tower. A phone wiring switchboard.