When supporting a high-usage service, there is always an opportunity for service outages that directly impact customers. When there is a service outage, service providers and businesses will be in a reactionary position while locating system failures. Depending on the structure of the service provider's or enterprise's troubleshooting agreement, there may be many steps that need to be taken before deploying a technician. Once technicians are deployed, finding their exact fault can still pose challenges.
The entire process is not only costly to service providers, but also inconvenient to their customers. In this article, we discuss how remote fiber optic monitoring can reduce costs associated with minimizing truck rolls and repair time.
Why Fiber Monitoring?
Let's review the reality of what happened in 2016 in a large city in the southeastern United States. A large service provider contracts with a group of people to install fiber in the vicinity. Contractors removed fiber optic cable service in 90 homes near 205 while fiber was installed. This is common, and without remote fiber monitoring solutions deployed, service providers and enterprises send technicians to spot problems before the repair process begins. It can take up to five hours on average!
Fiber Network Troubleshooting
In this example, we don't know the exact lead time to restore service. However, with remote fiber monitoring implemented in the system, the fault location process is automatically performed remotely. This process accounts for about 40% of repair time, which positively impacts your mean time to repair (MTTR). MTTR is a measure of how effectively a service provider can respond to, fix, and restore reported issues. With remote fiber optic monitoring, you can also reduce operating costs from unnecessary truck rollovers. Lowering your MTTR equals cost savings.
How Remote Fiber Monitoring Works
With a deployed remote fiber monitoring solution, you can monitor fiber networks from a centralized location. This is achieved by utilizing Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (OTDR) technology. An OTDR provides a virtual "image" of the network. The recorded "image" provides data on the integrity of the fiber, as well as any passive components in the cable path.
The OTDR sends light pulses to the fiber. The backscattered and reflected light is returned to the OTDR through an optical fiber and directed to a sensitive receiver through a coupler in the OTDR front end. For each measurement, the OTDR sends out a high-power pulse and measures the light that returns over time.
How much does a maintenance truck cost?
For operations in various industries, the need to send a technician to a location to troubleshoot, known as a "truck roller," is a significant expense. The cost of door-to-door service may be between 700-1000 yuan per occurrence, and may be greater among the following factors:
Labor: labor costs and unaffordable time for technicians, such as travel expenses including overtime
Vehicles: Maintenance, Insurance and Fuel
Opportunity Cost: Technicians are unable to perform revenue-generating tasks
These factors above show that unnecessary truck dumping wastes time and resources of service providers.
As the demand for fiber optic cabling continues to grow, as fiber optic networks continue to expand, there will be a need to effectively monitor your fiber optic network at the same time. Utilizing remote fiber optic monitoring can minimize reactive support and provide a sustainable way to reduce costly truck attendance. The solution will provide a better customer experience and be more time and cost effective in resolving network issues. To learn more about remote fiber optic monitoring solutions, schedule a consultation today!
