Fiber optic deployment challenges and their management in a developing country: A tutorial and case study in Ghana

Abstract

The telecommunication industry in Ghana has undergone various stages of transformation. The industry has experienced exponential growth over the last decades. Sustaining this growth hinges on efficient infrastructural deployment and management. Fiber optics technology has become the primary network infrastructure and a communication medium, which provides higher bandwidth capacity high speed for current and emerging technologies. As the demand for new technology and services increases, fiber optics technology brings the promise of a flexible, scalability, full‐service network platform with potentially unlimited capacity. Although mobile network operators have invested significantly and strategically in fiber optic infrastructure, there has been an increase in the number of network outages caused by frequent failures in fiber optics networks such as fiber cable cuts. Fiber cable cuts have become the single most significant cause of transmission failure or disruption to telecommunication services in Ghana with an enormous impact on the subscriber's experience. This research seeks to investigate the challenges in fiber cable deployment in Ghana, with emphasis on the technical, regulatory, managerial challenges and recommend the appropriate solutions. The challenges of frequent fiber cuts can be attributed to external factors such as dig‐ups during road construction. Lack of regulatory guidelines and policies on fiber deployment and management poses a major threat to the fiber management in Ghana.

Predicting the actual location of faults in underground optical networks using linear regression

“…The values obtained for the evaluation matrix MSE and MAE were 0.061291 and 0.080143, respectively, indicating the predictive model is good for the prediction of the exact distance of faults in underground fiber cable cut. Identifying and repairing the fault in the underground optical networks significantly reduce the cost of repairing the faults 41 and then overcome the challenges identified by Reference 42.…”

Using machine learning techniques to predict the cost of repairing hard failures in underground fiber optics networks

“…The cuts of underground fiber cables reduce the optical network availability, affect customer experience, and increases the MNOs cable repair costs. The rampant underground cable cut further reduces rural network expansion and affects last mile connectivity strategies [1][2][3].…”

“…have experienced similar hard failures in the underground optical networks. Studies have found that underground fiber cables were more likely to be cut in rural areas, even though several unapproved activities in urban areas have accounted to a higher number of fiber optic cables destructions in a given area [1,3].…”

“…The cut also increases the service provider's operational costs which further reduces rural network expansion, affects last mile connectivity strategies, and it also incurs a high maintenance cost [2]. The cost of maintenance or repairing cuts in an underground cable is very expensive [3]. This paper sought to determine the cost of repairing fiber cable cuts by using K-means clustering for failure classification and FFNN to predict the cost of repairing fiber cable in the future.…”

A study on FTTH implementation and migration in Nepal

“…In NT, civil department coordinates the design and implementation of civil related works. The major challenges for this type of work is to establish coordination with the related other offices such as road department, urban development department, electricity authority, and other related departments(Nyarko-Boateng et al, 2020).…”