Re: Outsourced NOC Solutions

[Dave Cohen <craetdave () gmail com>]

There is a middle ground between “not managing customer light” and “not managing anything” though. The Adva ALM 
solution that a few folks that have mentioned, along with others like Lucent SmartLGX, effectively bridge this gap by 
helping trace the precise location of cuts and even smaller scale incidents like microbends to expedite diagnosis and 
repair to the extent possible. It’s not a panacea and definitely not a substitute for managing the hardware at the 
endpoints, but it does improve operational responsiveness in a measurable way. And yes, there are dark fiber providers 
in the Northeast that leverage this technology, at least on some portion of their fiber plants. 

Dave Cohen
craetdave () gmail com

> On Jun 8, 2020, at 5:40 PM, James Jun <james.jun () towardex com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 08:10:44PM +0000, Mel Beckman wrote:
> > I???m not talking about a full-time engineer for the life of the network, just for designing the infrastructure 
> > management before first customer light.
> >
> > -mel via cell
>
> Dude, it's dark fiber.
>
> I for one, do _NOT_ in any shape or form, want my DF provider to put any equipment (monitoring, or otherwise) on 
> strands I lease, period.  I just want
> tubes in the ground, end of story.  This is certainly not an airplane and does not need a pilot.  It's passive tubes 
> sitting on right of way and customer
> is licensed to pass light thru that passive tube.  Everything else is extra, and I want no active service whatsoever 
> (besides for power capacity at
> regen plant colo).
>
> If there is a disturbance event that creates LOS alarm on customer equipment, they will call in and open a ticket to 
> begin troubleshooting.
>
> Name me one dark fiber provider in northeast that (unless you buy their managed dark fiber solution) will monitor 
> your fiber strands and the customer
> light for you.  I can tell you, major fiber providers in northeast are all the same:  the customer is the monitoring 
> system.  If fiber is down, customers
> call in.  In fact, I can't recount how many times I've had dealing with a large fiber provider here (unnamed to 
> protect the guilty) who also requests
> and asks customers to shoot OTDR for them.
>
> Generally speaking, dark fiber providers who also compete with their customers (e.g. fiber provider that sells lit 
> services) have tendency to react
> faster to certain fiber cuts on certain routes, if their backbone links are sitting in them.  But for specialty dark 
> fiber providers who only sell dark,
> it's not a bad idea to light one of the strands for internal continuity checks; but at worst case scenario, when a 
> customer calls in to report an LOS
> alarm and suspects fiber disturbance, that's usually enough information to start sending your crews out and begin 
> taking traces.
>
> James