The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Pete Pizzutillo:
This episode of the Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software and VETRO FiberMap.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Broadband Bunch. We are live from Fiber Connect 2023 in Orlando, Florida. And I am joined by two of our international guests from Mediatel, Augustin and Diego. Before we get into some of your thoughts about the event and what’s going on in South America, perhaps you can just give us a little background on your company and what you guys are doing.
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Well, Mediatel is an engineering company in South America. We are based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And we cover the region, mainly most of the countries in South America. We have projects in Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, but we are commercial in all the other countries. We provide fiber networks and engineering services, quietly focused on GIS solutions, and we provide design surveys, data migration, and software implementation around the deployment process of fiber networks.
Pete Pizzutillo:
And who are the typical customers that you’re dealing with?
Diego Garcia del Rio:
Normally, the majority of our customers right now are open fiber networks, medium to large size, so a couple hundred thousand home passes. But yeah, we’ve been working lately with a big open network down in Argentina and in Colombia, as well as some smaller, maybe tier two, tier three ISPs in the region, mostly focusing on FTTH, fiber-to-the-home deployments.
Pete Pizzutillo:
And what are some of the challenges that your customers are seeing right now from this time? A lot is going on in North America, we have a good appreciation of that, but supply chain issues, costs of money, what else are you guys seeing down there?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Well, on one side, there’s always the restriction of resources by companies. And I would say that being a little bit more delayed than probably in the US and European markets, we are in the steep part of the deployment curve. So there are big projects that need to be very competitive in terms of costs. So companies that are deploying one million home passes per year, one and a half million aiming at two million, and that poses beyond restriction problems. They have restrictions on engineering resources.
And I would say that the main problem that we’re seeing right now is many companies are doing this in a disordered fashion, and that’s where we try to provide some consulting and try to order those scalable projects.
Pete Pizzutillo:
What would be examples of some of the things that you’re helping your customers think differently about on how they approach the design and deployment?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Well, we aim at establishing workflows that try to eliminate the data entry tasks. We know companies that have 100 people making inventory loads from AutoCAD designs, so that’s a lot of cost. And we think there are a lot of quality issues in that process. So we propose a different approach to this, making use of the GIS philosophy of managing a database instead of a drawing and using the technology at hand like scripting and APIs, et cetera, to make a neater and more scalable process.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
And also, I mean, some of our customers have previously designed a lot in AutoCAD based and probably with not the best workflows, not the best tooling. So we are trying to help them. And maybe that was workable for smaller-size deployments. But as they’re trying to scale that deployment, we’re helping them migrate into a more GIS-centric workflow where they can speed up and where network engineering is not the bottleneck in the process. But maybe outside the plant, the actual physical construction becomes a bit more of the bottleneck.
The same thing in serving during the survey process, we help them out a lot in optimizing the quality of the data that gets collected, going from a paper-based survey into an electronic form, trying to reduce the number of times that data needs to be copied over and typed over and so on. So we’re trying to bring them over maybe to, I don’t want to brag, but towards this 21st century towards a much more modern way of doing the network deployment. That helps speed up and also reduce cost, which is a big factor in our market.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. Reducing cycle times but also the resources as you mentioned, and having skilled people, right? That’s what we’re seeing in North America. There are fewer people who are trained in some of the classic tools in engineering, and now you have to upskill somebody to use new tools or new methods. Do you see that within your country people are trying to figure out how to get more out of the same resources from a labor perspective?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Well, I know we are trying to do that. We develop our own system for, for example, a design where we’ve been able to multiply by a factor of eight or 10, the productivity of a designer. This allows us to have a very competitive offer, but also to be able to find the human resources to do the job.
So what we are seeing sometimes is that companies don’t pay attention to this at the early stages, and they bump into this issue when they are urging to reach their targets. And this is our strategy.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
But also by simplifying a bit or trying to simplify the design process as much as possible, what we were able to do is take a lot of resources that they’ve been doing network design on AutoCAD for maybe 20 years and help them migrate or get trained over in a couple of months or even less into a much more GIS-centric workflow by making the tool easy to use but also showing what the added value is. You don’t have to be retyping names or renumbering devices once you are making a small change in your network layout and so on.
In general, the resources and the designers are very keen on working in this way. Even people who have been working for 10 or 20 years in AutoCAD are very happy to see the time savings and the efficiencies. So you might say it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but people were definitely very willing to see the upside of this. We had some designers that they have no doubts about working on new projects with us because this has made the job so much more enjoyable for them.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Right.
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Right.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
I focus on the interesting engineering challenges and not on spending half an hour renumbering —
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Of feeding forms, yeah.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah. You mentioned something earlier about being cost-sensitive, right? That’s something that we are always thinking about or at least talking about is designed for affordability or designed for sustainability. In your market, it may be an extreme case as compared to North America, so how are you guiding your customers in thinking about making decisions that benefit them in the long term? And is it hard to do that? What are some of the examples that people are doing to institute the long-term affordability of these networks?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Yeah, I would say probably it’s the customers who guide us in this sense because in order to sell an idea, you need to show them it’s cheaper. You need to show them there’s a cost saving. It’s mandatory in our market. So we must prove and explore these concepts so we can offer them to the customers.
And I think that, for example, it is broadly adopted that a GIS inventory network is a need that the customers are quite convinced that there’s some OpEx reduction there. But we have not seen that yet in the prior process. So project management software, design software, serving, they’re still doing a lot of serving in paper. That’s where we have to explain what the cost savings in those services are.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
But also, the fact that we can help them do a much more accurate survey lets you really right-size the network and make sure you’re not overbuilding. Some of these networks that are open access are really targeting almost a hundred percent home pass coverage. So while you want to achieve that a hundred percent, you don’t want to overbuild.
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Right.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
And we help them by making our designs, let’s say, easy to adjust on the field and so on. They’re able to optimize the cable lengths and reduce the number of cables that need to be used and optimize the number of mechanical supports, so any work that needs to be done on poles before installation and so on.
So we’re trying to optimize the process as much as possible. The customers are starting to see the advantage of having a much more trackable build-out process in the sense of trying to really focus on optimizing and reducing as much as possible the cost. I mean, you’re still very bound by material costs. But there’s a lot of thinking and care.
That was also a big learning curve for us from our customers in terms of some of the cabinets that need to be installed compared to maybe North America, where a lot of these cabinets are on the pavement or on the sidewalk. These ones are pole-mounted. They must be a lot more compact so that they can be easily installed on a pole and still be relatively comfortable to work with because you might need access to that cabinet multiple times during the lifetime of the network. And helping our designers choose where to position those devices so that they’re relatively easily accessible.
It’s been a learning curve back and forth between our customers, some of the operators there, and also from our side in terms of processes and so on, helping them achieve a much more streamlined, trying to reduce any moment, any wait time that data might get held up or trying to speed up processes as much as possible. So, in that way, we’re trying to help them reduce and optimize costs in some manner.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Are you doing any of the build-out yourself, or do you guys work with construction firms?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
No, we are focused on engineering and data management, et cetera.
Pete Pizzutillo:
What are some of the best practices that you guys see between the planning and engineering side and the actual construction deployment where reality comes into play?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
In a way, our best practice or our aim is to remove. I don’t know how this will sound but remove or take a little bit back the use of AutoCAD. So what we are proposing, and we actually developed some systems for this, is taking advantage of GIS to improve the dialogue between the people in the field, the design team, and the management team in general. We think that is, for us, the best proposal yet. For example, we define special items that can very quickly or very ergonomically help the field team to explain easily what they did. And then, our design team probably makes the more technical and more formal adjustments.
Now, what we would love to have is some integration between the project management software and the inventory software. That would be great. I mean, there’s a lot of work trying to trace the as-built information and that kind of integration that at least we have not seen. We know there are some companies that are making some alliances there. I think that will save a lot of costs and effort and will improve the quality of the registrar of information.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
Some of the details we did were simplifying commenting on the field. So any change during the as-built process can be relatively easily documented. And it’s not a pen-and-paper note on top of a physical plan that sometimes gets lost. Sometimes you have corrections that then need to get digitized and then integrated into a system.
We’re trying to reduce that source of error and speed up the communication. Sometimes by making a lot of comments from the field, they can get back to the engineering office on the same day. So that helps speed up the process. And it also makes the data a lot more readable for the guys that are doing the physical installation on the devices.
Now, some of the operators and builders can look in their phones at what device they have to be connecting, maybe when they are up on a pole instead of having to look down and get a big physical plan and so on. We were dealing with map books and the paper plans that we had during one of the first buildouts. They were still doing the build-out on paper. And it turns out somebody had printed out a copy, and it was two revisions earlier. So something else was being built.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Right.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
By having a digital copy instead and so on and making it very mobile-friendly. Again, because of cost sensitivities and so on, we’re not expecting installers to have a big iPad, but rather a cheap Android phone and still be able to access all the data they need. They can get it offline ideally as well, so they don’t necessarily depend on a data plan and so on.
So we’ve been putting a lot of effort there. I think there’s a lot of value that starts to be seen. That’s a very recent development we’ve been making. But our customers are seeing a lot of value in that kind of tooling.
Pete Pizzutillo:
That’s great. Thanks for unpacking all that stuff. How can our listeners learn more about your company and the work that you’re working on?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Well, they can visit our website. It’s mediatel.com.ro. Of course, contact us. I guess you’ll leave a —
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, link to your LinkedIn?
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
— link, yeah. I think that’s the best way that they can directly contact us, and we can continue talking.
Pete Pizzutillo:
All right, great. Well, thank you for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of the show. It’s been a pleasure. And I hope everybody follows you guys on LinkedIn. Thanks.
Diego Garcia del Rio:
Thank you.
Agustin Rodriguez Varela:
Thanks.
