Comcast, the leading provider of cable, entertainment, and communications products and services in the United States, has won a 2006 BE Award for its Comcast Northern Division Upgrade Initiative in New England. The award category was “Geospatial: Communications.”
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are judged by an independent panel of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world’s infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks for their industries and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.
Comcast began its network initiative across New England in 1994, and all substantial upgrade activity was completed by 2003. As a result of this project, 27,535 miles were upgraded to a fiber-rich architecture – increasing bandwidths to 750 megahertz or higher.
The network upgrades were completed on time and on budget. When operating at full capacity, teams were designing and building more than 5000 miles of network per year. In addition to improving network reliability, the installation of a fiber-rich architecture enabled, in each newly upgraded area, the most advanced service offerings currently available.
MicroStation and Bentley Communications Solutions helped Comcast meet its aggressive project timelines by enabling the design team to quickly produce and disseminate information to construction crews and project coordinators. On average, the design team was able to produce 45,000 to 60,000 map prints per month.
Due to the database back end of the Bentley Communications Solutions, all mapped data was linked to Comcast’s Oracle database, providing nearly limitless reporting of location, quality control, address, billing system, and statistical data. As Robert Hegarty, GIS analyst, Comcast, pointed out, “The ability that Bentley software provides to easily document network assets linked to a back-end database has created a scale of efficiency previously unrealized, and the possibilities are only beginning to be tapped.”
Address management has played a major role in communicating engineering information to the billing system and other functional groups such as telephony provisioning and marketing. In addition, maintenance programs continue to benefit from the ability to locate infrastructure components and network assets using real-world coordinates. Moreover, purchasing efficiency and accuracy are improved by the ability to extract bill of material data for all construction work directly from Oracle, and often to match that data to a part number in the purchasing system.
For more information on Comcast’s winning project and all of the other 2006 BE Award projects, visit www.be.org/awards. For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit www.bentley.com/geospatial.
About Comcast
Headquartered in Philadelphia, Comcast Cable is a division of Comcast Corporation, the nation’s leading provider of cable, entertainment, and communications products and services. With 23.3 million cable customers, 10 million high-speed Internet customers, and 1.6 million voice customers, Comcast is principally involved in the development, management, and operation of broadband cable networks and in the delivery of programming content.
Comcast’s Northern Division serves 3.5 million customers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New York, Connecticut, Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and West Virginia. The division is based in Manchester, New Hampshire, and employs more than 9000 professionals.
About the BE Conference
The BE Conference, which consistently scores a 99 percent attendee satisfaction rating, is a once-a-year learning opportunity for Bentley user organizations offering professional training, technology updates, keynotes, and best practice sharing. At these sessions, attendees better themselves, better their organizations, and better the ways they can improve the world’s infrastructure.
For more information on BE Conference 2007, taking place April 29-May 3 in Los Angeles, California, and BE Conference Europe, taking place June 10-14 in London, United Kingdom, go to www.be.org/beconference.
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