Out of plant question

[chadmiller]

I work for a fairly large school district in Michigan. We own our own fiber backbone to connect over 120 different school buildings. I'm wondering if anyone might be able to tell me the best way to keep track of my fiber and the telephone/power poles that i'm connected to. At last count I think we have over 220 miles of fiber on over 5000 poles and no electronic version of the maps.

 

[GMgerry]

I am also a large Michigan school district and we have about 90% of our information. You may not want to tell us you district but I'm sure I can help. You you do post it and I can contact you. I am in the Southeastern aprt of Michigan.

 

[chadmiller]

I do have the original as builts from when the network was built almost 8 years ago as well as the maps that were given to us by DTE when we were audited a few years back. My problem is that I would love to make them electronic so that when pole changes happen I'm not trying to update them manually on paper. I do not look forward to the next time we get audited.

Sounds like you are pretty close to us. I work for the St. Clair County RESA

 

[GMgerry]

You bet were close, Oakland ISD and I do Autocad. 248.209.2199

 

[chadmiller]

I forgot to include the contact info. email is probabbly the best way to get me its cmiller at sccresa.org

 

[wires]

If your local government has a GIS department that would be a good place to start for the base maps. Another place is whoever does the property tax assessments. Most tax assessors use some form of GIS to prevent overlaping or gaps in the property maps.

While you can cobble up some maps in a CADD program a GIS approach will be more useful in the long run.

 

[chadmiller]

The GIS approach is the way I would really like to go. Expecially with the large number of changes that are always having to be done. Most of our fiber is run through rural areas where houses are being added causing new poles to be put in or existing poles moved.

I've played with a few GIS programs but had not thought about contacting our county gov. for there gis data.

The other problem i've been having is that the poles on the as builts are marked with two 6 digit numbers by the local power company Detroit Edison. I've got a sheet with what they call the Genisys grid index to help in trying to locate the map i'm looking for. It would be great if that same grid was somehow either converted to lat and long. or had an overlay for a gis program.

 

[RandalSw]

If you're being billed for the power or telephone pole contacts, I'd go to them and ask for the list of contacts by address. If you're not being billed, you've fallen through the cracks. Telcos and power companies even bill each other for contacts. That should solve the aerial part. The buried stuff should be in some utility companies right of way and the counties may have something.