GIS for Telecommunication

Question

I previously asked this question in mapinfo-L (google groups). Since, I think that GIS & Telecommunication is broad subject, I think GIS SE is the correct platform to ask these questions:

1. What are the uses of GIS in telecom?
2. How to use GIS for telecom?
3. Is there any free study and test material? There are a lot of them but none are free :( .

Answer 1

I worked as a GIS analyst in the celluar telecommunications industry for a short while.

1. Most of my tasks centered around working with coverage data, i.e. making coverage maps. I also did a lot of analysis with Census data, determining how many people we covered, what services they were covered with, and how many people lived in areas with "good" coverage. A lot of the coverage modeling software is GIS-enabled as well.

2. When I was in telecom, most companies were using MapInfo. I'm not sure if this is still true. We made heavy use of the Vertical Mapper (raster analysis) extension do work with coverage data.

3. Well, I would start by learning MapInfo, if you don't know it already. Training is available here: http://tutorials.mapinfo.com/tutorials/Index.htm. It's hard to come by free telecom data to practice with, though.

Answer 2

I once worked in Telecom project and learned a lot out of it. The best GIS work i have seen in Telecome sector is Telcordia. Have a look on their brochure which explain little bit what they can do in Telcome. http://www.telcordia.com/collateral/brochures/net_engineer.pdf

Answer 3

There are lots of different areas of Telco. I'd suggest looking into Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). If you're in the US, stimulus funding for deploying fiber to rural areas makes this an attractive area. (This sure looks better than LightSquared plan which interferes with GPS reception.)

The relational database designs for modeling fiber connectivity I've seen are quite complex. Keeping track of splices is especially challenging. It makes me wonder if something other than the relational model would be better suited.

From ArcFM's Fiber Manager.

Here's a related question.

Answer 4

There's so much you can do in Telco.

To name a few, you cna do push marketing, you can create areas, such as O2 Germany, called home areas which allow you to use your mobile inside certain areas as the cheaper home rate, then track the phoen to charge them approiately if they use it out of the area, you can check out the demographics of your customers, locations. You can track a phone user (useful for keeping tabs on kids, workers, company assets, vehicle tracking, etc).

In short, pretty much everything you can do in business, you can do with Telco's. One of the things you should do as a practitioner, expecially freelance, is to expand a clients understanding of what is actually possible. Not only do Telco's have the address information of their clients, they actually know where they are, if their phone is turned on. This opens up endless development of that location data.