How to make FTTH rollout planning more efficient

Fiber to the Home (FTTH) deployment strategies require meticulous planning. Detailed digital maps can make the process faster, smoother, and more reliable.

Key takeaways:

• Today’s FTTH network design methods have limitations
• Scaling FTTH network planning is vital for success in a competitive market
• Learn how LuxCarta’s digital mapping solutions speed the process up
• Discover the benefits of GIS for FTTH deployment planners 

FTTH rollout planning is a highly complex process. If your business hopes to connect homes, offices, or infrastructure to the fiber optic network, there are dozens of potential obstacles and issues to prepare for. From acquiring permits to dig cable trenches, to choosing where to install infrastructure (underground, on building facades or poles), many issues exist. 

And one especially complex stage of FTTH network planning is mapping out the routes of your cables. For many telecoms companies and internet service providers, this part of the planning phase is especially time-consuming and manual - with plenty of things that can go wrong. 

However, by using detailed digital maps, fiber optic network planning becomes a lot more smoother. 

Our solution: Countrywide Building Footprints for Planning Fiber Deployments

Today’s FTTH rollout planning has room for improvement

The planning and surveying phase of an FTTH deployment is, arguably, the most crucial stage in a successful rollout. It allows you to assess the feasibility of fiber installation, find potential obstacles, choose the best routes, and calculate quantities of materials, people, and resources that will be needed to deliver fiber to an area. 

But at present, network operators tend to rely on fairly manual processes:

• Physical site visits using surveying equipment
• Mapping cameras (often vehicle mounted, which requires driving around a target area)
• LIDAR and drones
• Manually creating cable route plans, often based on OpenSource Maps

These methods may have been suitable in the early years of fiber optic networks. In the past, the telecoms sector and internet service providers mainly focused on urban areas when deploying FTTH. These areas had large populations and fairly predictable layouts. Most towns and cities have a good base of infrastructure for installing fiber optic cables and fewer natural obstacles. Given the size of the customer base and potential ROI, a manual approach was still acceptable.  

However, in many countries, the ‘low-hanging fruit’ stage of urban FTTH deployment is now largely complete. If we are to close the digital divide and connect more homes and businesses in rural and remote areas, the industry will need to find more efficient ways to plan FTTH projects. At the same time, in countries that are only just beginning to deploy FTTH, efficient planning will be essential to achieve a speedy rollout. 

Advanced digital maps for FTTH

For decades, LuxCarta has worked with the telecoms sector to support the rollout of infrastructure with sophisticated GIS maps. Today, a growing number of our customers are using LuxCarta’s solutions for FTTH rollout planning too. 

Discover our FTTH planning solution

At LuxCarta, we create highly detailed 2D and 3D maps based on the very latest satellite imagery with resolutions as high as 30 cm. We use both manual and automated techniques to identify vegetation, building footprints, topography, landuse/landcover, and population density from the satellite image. We then turn this data into layers that you can download and use in your FTTH network planning.

Using our digital maps for FTTH has several key benefits:

Speed up planning with building and vegetation footprints

Our maps make FTTH rollout planning significantly faster. They capture and identify enormous amounts of detail and information about a site from a single satellite image. That means your technicians can spend much less time on the ground gathering basic information and can focus attention on more complex stages of planning.

LuxCarta’s building footprint technology creates accurate 2D and 3D representations of all buildings, which can help in planning and optimizing the placement of fiber optic cables, avoiding obstacles, and ensuring efficient routing. 

Similarly, our vegetation maps provide valuable insights into the location and extent of vegetation in your target area. These maps help in identifying tree lines and canopy coverage, which are crucial factors when planning underground and aerial deployments.

Scale from local to global

We can produce maps at all scales - whether you want a countrywide map that will show your entire FTTH network, or to zoom into a specific neighborhood or even street - we can deliver the data you need. 

Understand the landscape with land use classification

LuxCarta’s maps provide detailed insights into land use. The maps can show you where there are buildings, forests, open farmland, roads, rivers, lakes, bridges, and other landscape features. For fiber optic network planning, this information is of course vital. 

For example, if you plan to connect a rural village to the fiber optic network, it's important to know if it’s surrounded by open farmland or dense forest. You might favor aerial cables if the village is in the middle of fields - there’s less risk of environmental damage from falling branches. On the other hand, underground cables might be preferable in a forested area. 

Use population maps to prioritize customers

While some regions already have fairly advanced fiber optic networks, other regions are only just beginning the journey. LuxCarta’s solutions include population maps (PopMaps) which help you assess population density at a glance. 

Many of our customers operate in countries where local mapping agencies or access to reliable government data is limited. In these regions, our advanced mapping solutions are particularly valuable, providing the critical data needed for successful FTTH planning and deployment. By offering detailed and up-to-date geospatial data, we help bridge the gap, ensuring that even in areas with fewer resources, your network planning can be just as efficient and precise.

Maximize FTTH network reliability with topographic and clutter data

The reliability of fiber optic networks can be disrupted by a number of local environmental factors. If a river floods, if there are landslides, if a tree’s roots grow through your cable channel…all these issues can disrupt fiber optic networks. 

LuxCarta’s maps give you detailed data about your area of interest. Our topographical maps give you a clear view of the lay of the land and identify possible issues (such as landslides). Similarly, our clutter maps can identify trees and vegetation, rivers, and other factors that may affect your cables. 

Support permitting with data for environmental impact assessments

As part of FTTH rollout planning, you may be required to carry out an environmental impact assessment, showing how your plans comply with local legislation. Our vegetation and land use maps help here. 

You can use them to show that your planned routes for trenches, aerial cables or facade cables do not impact on the surrounding environment (or indeed, the aesthetics of a place). This can help speed up permitting approvals. 

Meet the demand with faster FTTH rollout planning

Demand for high-speed fiber internet is only set to grow in the coming decade - with some estimates suggesting the global market will more than double in the next five years. 

LuxCarta’s advanced maps are already being used by businesses in the telecoms and ISP sector to support FTTH deployment strategies. Want to see how our advanced maps give you the edge when planning FTTH networks? Contact us today.