case study
User
Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD) supplies broadband internet to commercial and residential customers across Kitsap County, Washington.
Challenge
KPUD's quickly growing fiber network needed a cost-effective management system to more quickly trace outages.
Solution
The utility sought out GEOGRAPH's CrescentLink product, which is an extension of Esri's ArcGIS software.
Result
Time spent tracing line breaks to specific customers was cut by roughly 10 hours.
Cost savings to troubleshoot and fix fiber breaks amounted to up to $10,000 per commercial customer.
The Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD), which provides telecommunications services throughout Kitsap County, Washington, has rapidly expanded its fiber-optic network. Installing 200 miles of fiber across the county of about 274,000 people, the public utility first focused on connecting public facilities and community anchors including hospitals, schools, libraries, government offices, and military bases. After extending its network's reach to businesses and other institutions, the utility focused on delivering broadband to underserved residential populations that needed access to high-speed internet. As its network quickly grew, the utility needed an efficient way to map and manage it. KPUD relied on CrescentLink by GEOGRAPH, software built on Esri's ArcGIS Desktop, to create accurate maps of its expanding fiber network, giving it access to data and tools to keep customers connected.
KPUD, which has managed Kitsap County's water services for decades, became a wholesale telecom provider in 1999. As its network grew, the public utility needed a cost-effective way to accurately track and map changes so it could troubleshoot outages, communicate between teams, and better serve its customers. After experimenting with manual and time-consuming processes, the utility sought a network mapping solution that would satisfy multiple requirements. It needed to be easy to use; connect to a customizable data structure to reflect all aspects of KPUD's network map, including each splice and connection it had already identified in Esri's ArcMap; provide seamless collaboration between office and mobile teams; simplify troubleshooting for faster outage response time; and manage expansion build-outs.
KPUD found what it needed to optimize its network map using CrescentLink, GEOGRAPH's powerful fiber mapping and management product built on Esri's ArcGIS Desktop. GEOGRAPH supported on-site training, installation, and setup and helped KPUD to seamlessly upload its existing data into CrescentLink without any need for external system integration.
KPUD now has accurate and detailed fiber network maps, which has helped the utility to remotely trace an outage to a specific customer before deploying resources in the field. This shortened the time it had taken to identify a line break for a single customer by roughly 10 hours, saving hundreds of additional hours each year traditionally spent locating outages in person. The utility has also saved up to $10,000 in troubleshooting and fixing fiber breaks for each of its commercial customers.
Since helping implement KPUD's needs, GEOGRAPH has launched CrescentLink Web Experience, a mobile environment that has allowed any changes made in an office on desktop computers to be reflected in real time on mobile devices on-site.
With CrescentLink, a lot of work that had been tedious and manual is now handled virtually. We have saved hundreds of hours per year that would have been spent trying to figure out where fiber breaks are in the field.