Geotagging: Digitizing Telco Asset & Critical Infrastructure Management

The strength of a telco is defined by its network coverage. As a result, most telcos have had to scale their networks quickly to deliver a high quality of service to customers and to stay ahead of the competition. This means, rapidly multiplying the number of mobile towers and kilometers of optical fiber cables.

In a market like India, for example, there are close to a million mobile towers alone, plus 2.4 million kilometers of optical fiber cables – many of these are in remote areas that cannot be accessed daily. While telcos know where these assets are supposed to be at any given time, the reality is that tracking them reliably is difficult. This is where geotagging comes in.

Geotagging uses technology to pin-point the exact location of an asset. If the technology is sophisticated enough, geotagging can also help understand the status or health of the asset. The concept of geotagging is quite malleable and useful in a variety of use cases ranging from security and law enforcement to wildlife conservation and even asset management.

The Indian government has recently announced that it is going to be pursuing geotagging of its telco service providers’ assets such as mobile towers and optical fiber cables. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2027 and is expected to yield several short and long-term benefits.

By gaining visibility into the location and status of the assets, one of the benefits that will accrue is in the sphere of disaster preparedness and disaster recovery. Next, round-the-clock monitoring of these assets can help boost network resilience in the country. Also, geotagging mobile towers and optical fiber cables could also help identify gaps in connectivity needed for full-scale adoption of next-generation technology use cases such as connected and autonomous cars, virtual and augmented reality in metro travel, and more.

Finally, everyone recognizes that communications infrastructure is critical to the functioning of every nation today. Geotagging – with all the observability and visibility it brings – can help secure any nation’s network assets.

The Indian government has plans to kick-start the project through its state-owned telco enterprise, but private players are key to this initiative and will have an opportunity to participate. While India is pursuing geotagging for its telco assets in this project, the technology is set to be used in a number of other countries to map and gather intelligence about their critical infrastructure.

Service Providers Could Leverage Existing Technology Investments

Many of the Service Providers around the world, including in India, have invested in Cisco technologies that can help them with the Government’s new geotagging initiative. From Cisco’s Mobility Services Platform to Application Centric Interface (ACI), Accedian Skylight, and more – all offer ways to securely comply with the government’s requirements.

Investments in these technologies, on the part of the telco service providers, show a degree of foresight and a vision to deliver a better service to the people they serve.

Service providers know that tracking assets and focusing on gaining observability, visibility, and monitoring capabilities not only helps them better understand the status of their network in real-time, but also helps remediate issues quickly and often pre-empt issues before they arise.

Truthfully speaking, given the number of mobile towers and the millions of kilometers of optical fiber cables in the country, delivering these capabilities at scale means leveraging highly efficient automations and a powerful analytics engine. Together, they enable service providers to see across the telecom stack, from the network to the business, generating meaningful insights, providing seamless monitoring, and ensuring optimal management of network performance and security.

Service providers that have deployed any one or a combination of these technologies ​use them to constantly monitor their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI). Ultimately, observability and analytics enhance 5G and telco service delivery while addressing competition and margin pressures.

How Observability Unlocks the Potential of Geotagging

If you really think about it, the core purpose behind India’s geotagging initiative in the telco space is to be able to locate assets and monitor their uptime, availability, and performance. And while that can be achieved in a variety of ways, the reality is that cutting-edge technologies – like the ones from Cisco – can help bring a new degree of observability to service providers and to the government so that they can achieve great results.

For example, some of the sophisticated service providers we work with use distributed tracing and telemetry data collected from their assets to guarantee a standard for the Quality of Service (QoS) they deliver to customers, irrespective of their location and use case.

In India, service providers with extensive networks spanning the length and breadth of the country, have a competitive advantage. However, the manpower required for the maintenance of this network, especially as some parts of it age and some parts of it grow, is a huge challenge.

Telcos with observability built into their network assets and systems, therefore, can use predictive maintenance as well as autonomous network management to delight customers without hurting their margins.

For the purposes of the government project, observability can help bolster disaster recovery efforts but also make it possible to stress test the network based on potential use cases before they’re deployed to identify gaps and areas of improvement. Doing so will ensure that the ecosystem in the country is robust as the government guides organizations and people to leverage new technologies for business & personal growth, safety, convenience, and more.

Watching Deadlines and Anticipating Milestones

While much information about this initiative is available in the public domain, India’s Department of Telecom (DoT) has said it expects to complete the project by 2027. Given the country’s past experience with geotagging, for example, with payment system touch points in the recent past, there’s no doubt that we’ll see milestones achieved and the deadline met when the time comes. In fact, there are expected to be more critical infrastructure in the country – and around the world – that are marked for geotagging projects in the near future.

For critical infrastructure owners anywhere in the world, especially those that don’t have the full set of capabilities to implement geotagging, getting started with an evaluation and implementation plan will be key – if they want to benefit from this amazing technology that is revolutionizing critical infrastructure management and helping create opportunities to unlock value across use cases.