Broadband is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity to participate in modern society. Nothing has highlighted this more than the past few years. We have become a digital-first world overnight.

This tectonic shift has driven the need for reliable broadband connectivity, particularly in rural and underserved areas. As a result, a major emphasis locally and worldwide, is on upgrading and expanding network capacity. Operators have been building as fast as they can, governments have provided billions in funding for more expansion, and now, they are facing a significant labor shortage.

As operators scramble to add as many new locations as fast as they can, some industry executives are warning of the labor crunch and what it means for expansion plans. There are fears that demand will not be met. And with labor shortages comes more expensive labor costs.

But capital needs to be put to use and demand is not slowing anytime soon. So, what can operators do?

At times like this, operating as efficiently as possible is crucial. From our perspective, there are three key things that leading operators can do to maintain the required level of output.

Automate where you can. Manual processes are just that, manual. They require people. The more you can automate with the tools available to you, the more effectively you can operate.

One area where this can be done is in network design and planning. By automating things like high and low-level fiber plans, BOM estimates, and route/path optimization, you can reduce costs associated with design time and capex deployment.

Make sure your OSS stack is interoperable. By bridging the various systems deployed with integrations, your entire OSS can run much more seamlessly. Enterprise systems that are not able to talk to each other create information silos, which breeds inefficiency. Aim to breakdown those silos and make key information available to everyone that needs it.

Operationalize real-time network data throughout your organization. As an operator, your network infrastructure is everything, and too often this data is not accessible beyond the planning and engineering teams. Through enabling departments like sales or customer service to have a real-time view of the network, you can offer more reliable service, expand subscriber footprint, and save on costs.

How Synchronoss spatialSUITE can help

We’ve been working with operators around the globe for decades to streamline the network design and asset management process. Comprised of several components, spatialSUITE provides an automated, all-in-one network design and management platform.

Automated network design. Powered by spatialSUITE’s connected network data model, you can run automated what-if scenarios in mere minutes. You can automate completion of high and low-level plans for network builds, complete with automated route-finding functions.

spatialSUITE customers have been able to slash design time by up to 80% and capex by 5%.

Seamless integrations between systems. Whether it is your enterprise GIS from Esri or outage monitoring from ServAssure, spatialSUITE makes it easy to interact with third-party systems so you can get the most out of your network data.

Imagine if you could be served with an outage notification, use that location to trace the network and identify the root cause, and take action to remedy the situation before customers notice. Not only does it save you time and money, but it also allows you to pinpoint the root cause and resolve it faster, providing a better customer experience.

spatialSUITE customers have been able to reduce network downtime by up to 30%.

Intuitive, browser-based access to network data throughout your organization. spatialSUITE allows you to operationalize your network data by serving it seamlessly to different departments. You can take advantage of the amazing work your engineering team does and enable teams like customer service, sales, and network operations with a real-time view of the network.

This lets your sales team to identify and proactively target new customers based on network expansion plans. It enables you to understand how to meet SLA commitments for mission-critical customers like hospitals. Or you could reduce the time to fix an issue by tracing the network in spatialSUITE based on an OTDR reading.

spatailSUITE customers have been able to increase field worker productivity by up to 15%.

It really comes down to what your processes are – our tools can be configured to meet your needs.

To learn more about how Synchronoss spatialSUITE can help you, please contact us for a demo.