The topic of network planning addresses everything from long term strategic planning down to the detailed design, specification and configuration of equipment.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planners will take a longer term view of how and when the network needs to expand. They’ll take into account how quickly new customers are signing up, different services are being adopted and how much capacity is being used. Major investments in new technologies, change of major equipment vendor and introduction of new services will all play a major part in their decisions. They may also have to deal with some of the major commercial shifts in the industry, such as network sharing, partnerships and even mergers and acquisitions.

Trend planning is a critical aspect of this task. Planners need to be able to see and interpret trends across a wide range of network equipment so that bottlenecks do not emerge unexpectedly. It’s not enough to be able to view trend reports showing capacity growth for individual nodes or transmission links. There is a requirement for the system to be intelligent enough to alert where capacity trends are changing, estimating where and when limits will be breached. Trend analysis should also take inputs from market forecasts, performance management and design capacity.

The impact of making the correct strategic planning choices strongly affects the level of investment in network CAPEX and OPEX. Poor planning results in overbuild – wasting investment in capacity that remains idle – or bottlenecks – with resulting poor customer satisfaction and lost revenue.

Tactical Planning

Tactical planning deals with more typical day-to-day business as usual. Regional planning teams will take account of current bottlenecks, new orders and coverage or failure points to prioritize where and when to expand and upgrade the network. Selection of the most appropriate equipment size and location are more complex tasks than they might first appear – with a continuously evolving network evolution and uncertain traffic growth, planners must balance the high cost of building out additional capacity against the risk of underutilization.

An up to date and accurate view of the network is essential when making decisions about incremental upgrades. Furthermore, a view which also shows existing planned upgrades allows much better informed and efficient choices to be made. With a single, authoritative view of the current and planned network, tactical planning becomes much more effective and leads to more co-ordinated network expansion.

Detailed Design

Having selected the type and location of new equipment, detailed design needs to identify and assign capacity for each type of resource required. This would typically include bandwidth across each transmission link end-to-end, leading to decisions on the best route to take and determining where geographically and physical redundancy is required. This is where capacity limits might be breached, requiring the design and fitting of additional cards, racks, servers and bandwidth. All of the current and new equipment will then need configuration information, such as routing, port allocation, number assignment and related parameters. With new equipment being added daily, the repetitive nature of this complex and intricate task can easily lead to errors. The design process is further complicated by the fact that the network itself is continuously evolving, so that designs may need to take account of previous designs which have not yet been installed. This “plan-on-plan” design approach must ensure that any dependencies are actively tracked, so that future design changes do not inadvertently affect others.

Repetitive complex design tasks such as these are ideal for computer automation. Once configured with the correct rules and dependencies, automated design can accept a small number of critical parameters and determine a prioritized list of solutions for the designer to accept or modify. Validation using pre-defined rules will reject incomplete, inaccurate or inappropriate designs leading to “right first-time” solutions.

This means field staff are given the correct instructions and reduces the chance of a wasted truck roll or site visit. Deployments are much more likely to succeed first time, leading to faster rollout, more efficient field force and higher network quality.

Having built out the network, deliver services to your customers through Service Fulfillment.