Maximize Fiber Networks with Outside Plant Software
By Jason Sherman - September 13, 2018IT infrastructure and networks today are growing at an incredibly fast pace. Daily modern life is only becoming more dependant upon technology, not less: as a result, the need for networks is skyrocketing. What does this mean on the network level — and for those in the trenches of fiber and telecom management every single…
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Stop Managing Your Outside Plant (OSP) In the Dark
By Jason Sherman - August 28, 2018Lately, I’ve been working on a great deal of OSP projects. While the scope between these different outside plant projects can vary a bit: some may be limited splicing and some may be heavy on the splices. One common thread, however, is how hard it is to track all of this information. While inside plant…
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Untangle Your Cable Management Mess
By Fred Koh - August 10, 2018Hey, I know what would be really fun to try at work today: let’s all spend hours trying to find a needle in a haystack! When you can’t see where your cabling is, and what exactly you have, you end up wasting countless hours trying to find cables you didn’t even know you have (or…
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Dashboards for DCIM, Outside Plant, and Network Mapping Software
By Jan Durnhofer - June 25, 2018netTerrain Dashboards (also called reports) are collections of gadgets showing aggregated data from the netTerrain database. These dashboards are accessed from the netTerrain project with a simple click (as we will see below). Whether it’s for DCIM, network mapping and documentation, or outside plant dashboards offer a very powerful visual way of aggregating and displaying…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps: Importing KML / KMZ maps
By Jan Durnhofer - June 8, 2018In this blog, the 5th installment to our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, we’ll show how you can bring existing outside plant data into netTerrain. If you already have outside plant data in Google Earth (or another tool that supports exports to KML or KMZ formats), you can leverage this data…
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Automagic Calculations for DCIM, OSP, and Network Mapping
By Jan Durnhofer - June 7, 2018In this blog on automatic calculations (using our DCIM, outside plant, and network diagramming software), we’ll review what we call ‘expressions’ in netTerrain. Expressions are functions you can create in netTerrain using transact SQL to compute or aggregate any sort of scale or value — and retrieve it in a property. You may want to…
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Manage Your Outside Plant: Tracing Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer - June 4, 2018In this 4th segment (and video) of our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn to trace a cable in our outside plant software netTerrain. In the previous segments in this OSP series, you learned how to: create a map in netTerrain OSP software, how to add objects to it…
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How to Reserve Resources in DCIM, Network Documentation, & OSP
By Jan Durnhofer - May 30, 2018In this blog, and accompanying video, you’ll learn how to reserve resources in netTerrain. Time and time again, we’ve seen countless situations in which our customers need to reserve a resource in netTerrain without making it active — while still being able to see the resource reserve reflected in the diagrams. Maybe a user wants…
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Manage Your Outside Plant: Mapping Fiber Strands in a Splice Box
By Jan Durnhofer - May 29, 2018In this article and video, the third segment in our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn how to apply netTerrain OSP to a very common scenario in GPON network mapping and fiber documentation: creating fiber strands and mapping them to a duct (you can click here to watch the…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps: Manholes, Conduits, Ducts
By Jan Durnhofer - May 14, 2018Welcome back to our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps: in this second installment in the series, you’ll learn how to place manholes, conduits, and ducts within your outside plant diagrams. In the introduction to this series, you got an overview of how you can create maps in netTerrain. To recap, these…
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Tales of Fiber Network Outages
By Jason Sherman - April 18, 2018Ever seen the insurance ad that goes something like, “Insurance: when you need it, you really need it” alongside a photograph of a house with extensive damage? Fiber network documentation goes something like that: when you need it, you really need it. Fiber networks are, by their nature, vulnerable to damage. Wondering what the top…
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Why Airports Need Inside & Outside Network Maps
By Jason Sherman - April 16, 2018Ever really look at a map of the airport? It’s a bustling network of terminals, concourses, shopping centers, food courts, kiosks, security checkpoints, and, of course, airplanes. If you’ve ever been delayed for hours, you know that airports can be a destination unto themselves (for better or worse). Airports are constantly evolving — and their…
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