Features
The design settings are the ones a fiber build actually uses.
Drop length, hub spacing, cable size, duct, slack, and whether you want a splice plan. The output is a network and a bill, not a picture of a network.
Route and drops
- Trace one contiguous fiber route across the uploaded roads, underground and aerial.
- Snap each drop to the nearest point on the fiber, not the nearest vertex.
- Set a maximum site drop and a separate maximum On The Way drop. Override one site from the map.
- Edit underground and aerial routes: move a vertex, insert one, delete one, split a segment, or draw a new one.
- Upload sites and On The Way locations as GeoJSON or GeoPackage. Projected coordinates are converted to WGS84.
On The Way and exclusions
- Run a standard design, then an On The Way design that adds homes without moving the fiber or the OLTs.
- Lasso On The Way homes and exclude them. They stay on the map in gray and are skipped on the next design.
- Mark a single site unserved from its popup. It is left out of the next design.
- Pick Standard or On The Way when you export or import the design.
Hubs and OLTs
- Place hubs along the fiber, spaced from the homes they serve.
- Spend the drop budget before extending a hub tail.
- Place as few OLTs as the optical budget allows: 20 km standard or 40 km extended.
- Keep the OLT locations when On The Way homes are added, or reset them.
- Click an OLT for the 1:32 port plan. Homes past the drop limit stay on the map, marked.
Middle mile and competition
- Bring in a carrier's existing fiber as middle mile.
- Set a lease price per foot and a minimum span for each provider.
- The design uses the lease where it is cheaper than building, and leaves for its own fiber when that wins.
- A strand cap keeps the design from over-subscribing a lease.
Splice plan
- Off by default. Both the standard design and the On The Way design honor that switch.
- When it is on: feeder cables, hub tails, 1x4 and 1x8 PLCs, and a splice matrix.
- Fiber colors follow the TIA-598 order. Cable identities include the direction the cable enters.
- Click a splice for the matrix and the tray. Drag a strand to make a splice, or click one to break it.
Bill of materials
- Cable sizes from 12 to 384 count, split by underground and aerial.
- Duct by size, with fill rules for tails, drops, and feeder.
- Underground construction miles are counted once where two ducts share a trench.
- Handholes sized by purpose. Slack footage is a template setting and is added to the cable, not listed on its own.
- Hub tails are included in the underground cable by size.
The ground and the permits
- Bedrock depth from USGS, binned from 12 inches to 42 inches and deeper, so you see how much conduit is in shallow rock.
- Railroad crossings grouped by operator. Parallel tracks in the same right-of-way count as one.
- Waterway crossings from rivers, streams, and canals. Channels of the same waterway within 30 m count as one.
- Interstate crossings from the freeway system. Both directions within 80 m count as one.
- Tiles are cached on the server so the next design, and every worker, reuses them.
Versions, companies, and workers
- Keep several versions of a project. Move sites to a new version or a new project.
- Assign a folder to a company. Every project in that folder inherits the company.
- Read-only accounts see the design but cannot change it.
- Run designs on your own machines. A queue hands work to the first worker with room, and the log names the machine.