Telecommunications Community
In this entry I want to take a closer look at a previous posting on using mosaic datasets for managing RF data in the wireless service provider world. In that article I talked about how mosaics can be very effective for storing larger raster datasets and also for seamlessly recombining them using mosaic operators. These mosaic operators allow users to get the correct best server view of the network across multiple markets and view the raster data as if it were one seamless dataset.
In this article we’ll take a closer look at the details of using these same structures and mechanisms as the enabler for performing outage analysis.
The release of 10.1 is closing in with many of you already in possession of the prerelease version of the software. For those of you using the Telecom Data Model and Fiber Editing Tools you are probably wondering if these will be updated? Well the answer is yes, and for those of you anxious to test things out we are releasing an early beta of the tools running on 10.1 Prerelease.
The 10.1 release of the tools adds some significant changes and improvements:
- Fiber cable configurations are now user editable via an XML file. This allows you to specify any size and configuration of cable. The old drop downs for Buffer Tube and Strand counts are gone. A new GUI is available to allow easy selection of cable configuration.
We just posted the beta of the 10.1 Telecommunications Resource Center.
The new look and feel will hopefully make it easier to find relevant GIS for Telecommunications content that can help solve your business problems. The site incorporates the latest in social media and blogs to help keep you up to date on Esri and partner offerings.
Have you ever wanted to add live weather, recent earthquakes, or perhaps current fire locations to your applications without writing any code? Many of the projects we address in Esri Technical Marketing have this very requirement.
We tackled this challenge by using what we call the Aggregated Live Feed methodology. This process downloads data from live sources such as NOAA and the USGS and aggregates it into a geodatabase, which is then served through ArcGIS Server as map services. You can see some of these feeds in action by visiting any of the ‘latest incident maps’ on the Esri Disaster Response site.
Recently we’ve developed a much simpler approach called ALF-Lite that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of the enterprise geodatabase or third-party components. This methodology can be deployed to any large or small environment that supports Esri’s ArcPy site package.
Continue reading »
I recently read this article from our maps and cartography team on the topic of Radial Flow Lines and it got me thinking about the potential uses of it for visualizing customer data, more specifically call detail records within a telecom network.
With the upcoming release of ArcGIS 10.1 there is now support for the reading of .GRD (Grid) and .GRC (Classified Grid) raster files that are produced by MapInfo, Vertical Mapper and various telecom wireless planning tools. These files are usually used to represent the output of a signal strength prediction analysis for a given cell tower location. These raster’s are often converted to vector format on which various types of analysis are then performed.
This new format adds an extra dimension of analysis capabilities for our telecom users. This format can now be used like any other raster format with any of the core ArcGIS raster functions and the Spatial Analyst extension. The ArcGIS platform can now also be used to convert this data into its vector format for use within any existing vector based business work flows you may have.
We hope you enjoy this new feature with the coming ArcGIS release,
Regards,
Team Telecom
Having just got back from the Esri Telecommunications Seminar in Charleston, SC our users made us aware of issues surrounding good sources of authoritative base map data. In some rural locations the county data can be of lower quality and we know that some telecom organizations in these areas are running their own programs to GPS center lines of roads and other data.
Some of you mentioned great programs where you then share or swap data with the counties or other organizations in order to improve the overall content available.
I wanted to make you aware of some other programs that might be of interest:
We’ve heard lots of feedback over the last few days from users who want to find the old “Insert your favorite” blog. Unfortunately the redirects we had in place when we deployed the new ArcGIS Blog pointed to its home page instead of these specific locations, leading to many unhappy readers. We have most of these redirects in place now & will have the rest completed today. If you’d rather not wait, here’s a table matching the old individual blogs to their corresponding URLs and RSS feeds in the new unified blog.
Continue reading »
By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead
ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 (SP4) for English, is now available to our users for download via the ArcGIS Resource Center. This Service Pack contains performance improvements and maintenance fixes. Here are links to the downloads:
Release Note: ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 for the other five languages (French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish) will be released in the next two weeks. A follow up blog entry will be posted to announce the availability once they are ready.
For the past few years the various ArcGIS product development teams have hosted a few dozen separate blogs covering the width of the ArcGIS system. Now we have pulled those together into a single ArcGIS Blog so that you can more easily browse, subscribe to, learn from, and stay up-to-speed on the latest information from all our engineers and developers. In addition, the single blog reflects ArcGIS as a system and allows us to better tell big picture implementation stories that we couldn’t in the fragmented system.
If you do want to narrow your focus, just click a Category (under Technical Communities and Industry Communities) or Tag to see the posts for that particular area. You should find a category or tag that matches up with the subject area for each of the old separate blogs. A few may have been overlooked or thought to be unnecessary. We appreciate your feedback on specific categories or tags that should be added to help focus in on subject matter that is of interest to you.
Continue reading »
