Telcordia wins Portugal FTTH rollout

Telcordia announced today that it has inked a deal with Portugal-based triple-play provider Sonaecom to roll out Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) across the nation, reaching more than 1 million homes in the country by 2011.

Sonaecom will use Telcordia’s network management platform Network Engineer to reduce costs and time to market for the broadband installation. The software will enable Sonaecom to design, document and manage its physical network and associated inventory down to the customer residence, according to Laurie Spiegel, director of product marketing for planning and engineering at Telcordia.

Telcordia’s customers, which include more than 70 operators worldwide, primarily use Network Engineer in the planning stages of a broadband rollout, Spiegel said. Network planners, designers and construction workers use it to design a specific route and plan where equipment – including terminals in the central office – is needed.  That plan is then turned into an engineering work order for installation in the field. Network Engineer is the key vehicle to communicate information about the physical layer to all the players in the rollout process, Spiegel said.

“Once the network is built, the information contained in our system is really the cornerstone for success throughout the enterprise,” she said, adding that the finalized network plans are used by provisioning employees to understand network capacity, repair people to locate areas for fixing, the financial organization for asset management and customer service representatives for responding to problems.

According to Telcordia, Network Engineer also consolidates the network management responsibilities in a way that traditionally used computer-aided design (CAD) systems cannot. Using the Engineer to automate network design and connection tasks can reduce planning time by 80%, and Spiegel said that companies can budget 20% less of their FTTH budgets by having accurate information on construction needs.

Sonaecom, an alternative service provider in Portugal, initially deployed Network Engineer in 2001 to support its FTTH core network and large fiber runs to major business sites. Sonaecom is now budgeting $354 million for its nationwide expansion, which will allow it to serve more than 2.6 million Portuguese residents, which Spiegel said live mainly in multiple dwelling units, when it’s complete in 2011.