The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Technical decision · 1990–1992
GTE's NETCAP let 200 planners steer optimization, saving $30M a year
GTE built an interactive optimizer for its $300M-a-year access-network budget; planners kept judgment, software did the math, saving $30M a year.
GTE Corporation
The solution
GTE, then the largest local telephone company in the US, spent about $300 million a year on customer access facilities — the wires and switches connecting 15.7 million lines through 2,600 central offices. Planners designed this network by hand, one project at a time, so plans were slow and costly.
GTE Laboratories built NETCAP, an interactive decision-support system for access-network planning. It combined discrete-location and capacity-expansion models with an interface planners could interrogate: change an assumption, see the consequence, and let optimization propose a near-best set of projects.
By 1992 nearly 200 GTE planners used NETCAP. GTE credited it with more than 500 percent productivity improvement and estimated savings of about $30 million a year in network construction costs — roughly a tenth of the annual budget it was planning.
Why it worked
- Planners kept control, so the model was trusted instead of resisted
- Optimization caught cross-project effects a manual plan missed
- One tool standardized how 200 planners made the same tradeoffs
- Interactive exploration made the math explainable to management
What can be applied
Don't replace the expert with a black box: an interactive optimizer that shows options and lets the planner steer wins adoption and multiplies what a small team can plan.
Aftermath
GTE merged with Bell Atlantic in 2000 to form Verizon; NETCAP fed the planning toolkit for the combined network. The project became a standard reference for interactive facility-network optimization.
Sources
- NETCAP—An Interactive Optimization System for GTE Telephone Network Planning
- NETCAP—An Interactive Optimization System for GTE Telephone Network Planning (abstract)
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.