Telemar Brazil
Telemar is Brazil’s pioneer integrated telecommunications company; however, it is not immune to the turmoil caused by the diminishing number of wireline subscribers and growing competition from other carriers and cable operators entering the market. With technology development driving the industry to the convergence of services and digital networks for broadband applications, as early as 2001, the company was fully aware that it needed to diffuse the impact of the integration of operations and services and devise a strategy centered on delivering an improved customer experience. This involved consistently meeting customer SLAs and achieving nearly 100 percent network availability. Taking aggressive measures to meet these objectives, Telemar launched Supervisão de Rede Óptica (SRO), a sophisticated centralized fiber optic network monitoring project.
SRO involved implementing a 24-hour early-warning and network management system that could permanently monitor the national backbone with 21,660 km of optical cables across Brazil’s 18 states Located in Rio De Janeiro, the system would enable network operators to see inside the wide expanse of fiber optic cable linking networks and obtain up-to-the-minute reports showing how the numerous systems, switches, and technologies in the outside plant were performing. The effectiveness of this centralized system directly impacted how quickly and accurately Telemar would be able to find, isolate, and fix problems, key metrics that determined its future success in winning new subscribers and entering new country markets.
Although Telemar already had several remote fiber test systems from different suppliers, including JDSU’s (formerly Acterna) ONMS, implementing this project required a significant corporate investment. Consequently Telemar issued an RFQ with clearly defined specifications.
Telemar received responses to the RFT from approximately 10 vendors. Three companies were selected to compete in two trials held in two of Telemar’s strategic regions. JDSU, as one of those companies on the short list, demonstrated how the ONMS, a mature product comprised of remote probes and powerful centralized management software, flagged fiber problems on the central server and alerted the appropriate regional center. JDSU also was able to show that the ONMS provides data Telemar needs to minimize the fault location time. Sophisticated alarm triggering, activated when signals degrade below a user-set level, was another area where the ONMS excelled. After determining that the ONMS met 100 percent of the RFQ’s specifications, Telemar selected JDSU and two other companies as their remote fiber test system vendors.
Today, JDSU supplies 80 percent of the systems monitoring 95 percent of Telemar’s 22,800 km fiber optic national backbone with:
Telemar’s reliance on the ONMS has paid off by increasing the rate of detecting fiber breaks to 100 percent. Additionally, Telemar estimates that the ONMS has reduced their time to fix problems by at least 2 hours per problem.
The JDSU ONMS used by Telemar has become one of the world’s largest installed and running fiber monitoring systems. In 2006, Telemar’s plans for expansion include a budget allocation for five additional ONMS RTUs.
