Today, we are excited to announce an agreement with telecom engineering and design firm Spectrum Planning to resell Fiber IQ™, VCTI’s newest offering, providing service providers with crucial insights into aerial and underground broadband deployment costs without sending teams into the field for visual inspections. This insight enables faster, more accurate investment decisions, resulting in 20 percent or greater efficiency in capital allocation and faster time-to-market. With hundreds of thousands of homes relying on network builds enabled by future BEAD grants, service providers are increasingly more accurately estimating costs to build and quickly deliver once the grants have been awarded. Unfortunately, more than 1.8 million under- and unserved households have been impacted by defaults on prior CAF II and RDOF awards.
Spectrum Planning will now offer Fiber IQ to its service provider clients, helping them to build more accurate cost models quickly so they can successfully and effectively leverage grants to deliver broadband for all. Fiber IQ is powered by two solutions – Pole IQ™ and Geology IQ™ – that utilize AI to provide crucial insights into aerial and underground broadband deployment options and their respective cost implications with a speed and accuracy previously unavailable without deploying resources on the ground.
“VCTI’s Fiber IQ is a game changer for the broadband industry. Inaccurate or superficial assumptions about cost to build have been the root cause of too many surprises and too many budget overruns,” said Chris Kramer, Executive Vice President of Spectrum Planning. “With Fiber IQ, we now can have dramatically better insight into the cost to build and the ability to model different paths for optimal efficiency early in the planning process, enabling service providers to improve their investment decisions and drive much higher efficiency out of those capital investments. Spectrum Planning is excited about directly enabling our service provider clients to benefit from better cost analysis.”
Accurately assessing the viability of utility poles for aerial deployments and analyzing soil and rock hardness for a 1000-mile fiber deployment typically requires three to four months for field assessment, plus the cost of personnel. Fiber IQ delivers accurate insights in less than three weeks without sending a single person into the field.
“We are excited to partner with Spectrum Planning to bring the power of Fiber IQ to a wider audience,” said Sally Hudson, VCTI’s Chief Marketing Officer. “With BEAD making time-to-market and accurate cost assessments more critical than ever, working with a reseller partner with an impeccable reputation for quality work will accelerate the use of our solutions as the next-generation methodology for planning network expansion.”
About Fiber IQ
Pole IQ geo-locates and delivers a high-level assessment of the usability of each utility pole on the proposed network, including the possibility of space and location for the installation of new wiring. The outputs enable service providers to quickly identify and quantify route possibilities, enhancing presales activity and focusing permitting and detailed inspection resources on only the routes with the highest viability for aerial. The data enables construction partners to accelerate their tasks, potentially eliminating weeks, if not months, of the plan to design a construction process at a fraction of the cost.
Geology IQ maps the geological layer along the planned network route to a depth of up to six feet and provides the relevant construction implications. With more precise insight, the data enables service providers to field the correct crew and avoid delays, building faster to market while providing 20 – 30 percent more accurate estimates than industry-standard assumptions.
