*Road Ahead for GIS in Telecom.

The need for information sharing within companies and interoperability between systems has been recognized by the telecommunications industry for a long time. Originally founded in 1865 as International Telegraph Union, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) promotes standards in equipment that guarantee generalized interconnection between communication systems. To improve interoperability, ITU has developed the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN), a method of standardizing business organization. This hierarchy of support systems specifies interoperability through the use of industry-standard protocols. Geospatial applications need to support this same level of interoperability if GIS is to work well within this TMN-structured environment.

THE FUTURE FOR GIS IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS.

With businesses now reliant on fast and efficient telecommunications infrastructures, the coming years are likely to see continued investment in telecommunications projects around the world. While even the smallest companies are likely to use GIS for automating localised tasks such as network design and planning, the larger telecommunications operators will increasingly be looking to gain strategic advantage by standardising information throughout their organisations. Thus, marketing staff will be able to use the same data to map customer distribution as the engineers use to design fibre networks. All data will be held in a structured database with seamless interfaces to separate systems used by individual departments. The ongoing trend towards privatisation is likely to be the driving force behind this, although the speed at which this happens looks set to vary from country to country. As new technologies such as broad bandwidth and fibre-optics become the way forward for telecommunications operators, countries with little or no existing networks may find themselves at an advantage compared to countries with well established networks. Just as the countries with simple networks will be able to install the new technologies from scratch, so companies that have not yet automated their information management procedures will be able to adopt enterprisewide GIS

without the burden of legacy systems.

The following niche-applications of GIS are particularly relevant to Telecom:

·         AM/FM (Automated Mapping/Facilities Management 1, 2, 3)

·         Location Based Services (Applications of this could be helpful for field techs, or in reverse, if you're doing fleet-tracking.)

·         Marketing (Even if you don't use ESRI, many of these concepts are appropriate, for example the chapter demonstrating a GIS analysis to support a direct-mail campaign.)

·         Cartography (If you're making maps, even dynamic ones, make an effort to burn in some degree of sophistication. And don't forget that even good maps tell white lies.)

And for your GIS-specific, more generic skills, basically, Vector data management is going to be huge, as well as most any familiarity with SQL and RDBMS techniques---as the most appropriate solution will put your geodata in a server/database, then merge/join it with the attribute data your circuit engineers are sure to have on hand.

While accomplishing the entire educational task may be broad in scope, it's definitely not impossible

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