Xplore Telecom Infrastructure Data Capture Newfoundland
The Seemingly Impossible Made Possible: How Eagle completed its largest-ever data collection project to date in record time.
The Situation
As part of a major broadband network expansion, Xplore Inc. needed 7,900 kilometres of detailed telecom infrastructure data in only three months. Eagle Engineering and Consulting accepted the challenge and delivered the seemingly impossible in half the time.
Overview
The cultural divide between Canadian city and rural living is perhaps no greater than at the intersection of Internet access. For years, rural Canadians have endured broadband speeds so slow that online learning happens in the middle of the night, streaming high-definition videos is nearly impossible, and telehealth services can only support one patient at a time.
Recognizing the need for Internet equity, the Canadian federal government developed the multi-billion-dollar Universal Broadband Fund (UBF) to help local Internet providers connect 98 percent of the population to high-speed Internet by 2026 and 100 percent of Canadians by 2030.
Xplore, a Canadian fiber, 5G and satellite broadband services provider to rural communities, has been steadily and successfully bringing multi-gigabit Internet speeds to rural and remote communities across the country. With fiber builds throughout Canada, in February 2023 Xplore was awarded a UBF project to rollout a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network in Newfoundland—an initiative that will connect around 100,000 homes and businesses with up to 40 times faster broadband.
With the remoteness and geographic spread of Newfoundland’s rural communities, Xplore needed an efficient and precise data collection solution that would clearly capture 7,900 km of the province’s existing telecom infrastructure— in only three months.
Xplore issued an RFP for a mobile mapping approach that would capture photogrammetry and LiDAR data of roadways and telecom assets at centimetre accuracy. In August 2024, Xplore awarded Eagle Engineering and Consulting (Eagle) the data-collection contract.
“Eagle is a leader in mobile mapping in the telecom market and has been a successful partner to Xplore on previous projects,” says Dave Morley, Xplore’s VP of Network Design. “Although the deliverable deadline was aggressive, past experience with Eagle proved they can deliver under pressure, so we were confident that they had the right technology, expertise, and approach to succeed again.”
The Challenge
Not only was the geographic scope of the project a challenge, Newfoundland is notorious for fog, which is not favourable for LiDAR, and the acquisitions had to be conducted outside of the winter months, giving Eagle only a three month window. In addition, cell coverage across the province is poor, making GNSS correction services and communications among the teams tricky. The rural nature of the project also challenged the logistics of deploying the field teams.
“We knew from the outset that we’d have to be innovative to conquer the complexities of this ambitious and tight-deadline project,” says Dan McCarthy,
Eagle’s President. “But innovation is what we do. With an effective collection strategy, we knew we had the expertise and enabling technology to deliver quality LiDAR data and imagery on time.”
The Solution
Essential to Eagle’s success were its mobile mapping solutions that both safely allow teams to capture detailed geospatial and infrastructure data at highway speeds, and provide effective office workflows to transform the information into 3D replicas of the physical world.
Already equipped with Trimble MX9 and Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate mobile mapping systems, both of which have LiDAR sensors and multiple spherical cameras that simultaneously capture 360-degree full-circle data, Eagle also leased a Trimble MX50 mobile mapping system from Cansel, a local Trimble dealer.
“With our vehicle-mounted systems, we capture significantly more data and it’s more precise,” says McCarthy. “And because the 360-degree lasers and cameras capture everything they see, the need for site revisits is notably minimized, enabling us to be more efficient in the field. Working so remotely, we knew that having all three of these solutions on the road would give us the ability to collect with confidence.”
Driving for Data
In August 2024, Eagle crews began the fieldwork. Xplore ultimately required data from all over Newfoundland, but for efficiency, they provided areas of interest (AOI) collection priorities, allowing Eagle teams to optimize their route plans for optimal data capture. Each morning a crew member set up a Trimble R2 GNSS Receiver on a tripod to establish control, and the base station was then moved every 50 km to maintain consistent control. With the mobile mappers mounted on top of each vehicle, a two-person team drove the island’s coastal roads, capturing 3D data and panoramic images of the roadways, signage, and existing telecom infrastructure such as poles. A vehicle tracking system provided real-time location data so both Eagle and Xplore stakeholders could monitor data collection progress.
Targeting 100 km a day, the three, 2-person crews drove four-six hours every day, seven days a week, and in a mere six weeks, the Eagle teams had captured nearly 8,000 km of 3D data.
“Traditionally, most companies conduct this type of work with a GPS unit and walk pole to pole to collect asset information,” says McCarthy. “Even if you had three teams, that would require 530 days a team—4.5 person years of labour. With mobile mapping, we reduced that time to 180 person days—a 75-percent savings in labour—we gathered a staggering, seemingly impossible volume of data, and we finished nearly a month ahead of schedule.”
The Outcome
In total, field crews captured nearly 12 million images, 1.5 trillion LiDAR points and 180 Tb of data—all of which has been processed into 2D photogrammetric images and corresponding point clouds using both Trimble’s and Leica’s mobile image processing software.
“For a fiber build, you need to know the precise position of existing poles, the
position and number of cables connected to the poles, the condition of the poles, and if they intersect with water or railway crossings,” says McCarthy. “The comprehensive detail of these datasets provides Xplore with those attributes and more.”
Given the data volumes the acquisition campaign generated, Xplore submits requests for certain AOIs and Eagle hosts the requested 3D data and imagery on a Webportal for their teams to view and examine.
“There is no way this project could have been done conventionally in six weeks, nor would we have gotten the exhaustive information we need,” says Morley. “The level of visibility and amount of information you can glean from both the images and LiDAR data is phenomenal. It allows us to view and analyze any AOI, and it provides the detail we need to inform our network design work. Eagle clearly understood our urgency and data precision requirements and they overachieved in both quality and speed of completion.”
Eagle’s speed, in fact, enabled Xplore to contract them for another late-season data-collection project on Prince Edward Island.
As Xplore continues to benefit from the accurate telecom infrastructure picture in Newfoundland, Eagle has begun its second RFP award: data extraction. Company experts are isolating and extracting certain telecom features from the LiDAR data to support Xplore’s design plans.
The outcome of this daunting project has not only proven that Eagle can successfully answer the call, it has redefined what’s possible for large-scale reality capture infrastructure initiatives.