Developing an Open Source Geospatial Solution for the Telecommunications Industry

The recent focus on broadband capabilities in the United States has facilitated the expansion of new fiber networks, equipment, and access services such as VOIP, hosted solutions, and internet services. With these new assets and services in place, telecommunication companies are eager to find new clients that are geographically positioned to take advantage of their company's fiber assets and services.

 

Over the past two years, NBT Solutions has been developing a location-based web application that is helping fiber network providers identify customers that could potentially use their assets and services; quickly estimate costs for establishing service to new clients; and providing marketing and sales people with access to data and information about the overall fiber network. The application was built entirely with open source geospatial software and databases including: Map Server, Open Layers, GeoWebCache, and PostGIS. In addition, NBT Solutions used the open source framework MapFish for building the application. The application is provided to clients using a Software as a Service model and is being deployed using a reserved instance on Amazon EC2 servers.

 

During this presentation, NBT Solutions will discuss why we decided to build the application using  open source geospatial tools, including the value it provided the client; how we decided on each component to use; and the overall development process. Within the paper and during the presentation we will elaborate on what we perceive to be the strengths of this open source solution, some of the issues we needed to overcome, workarounds that were required, and our plans for adding more functions to the application.