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Open-Telecoms-Data / open-fibre-data-standard

Open Fibre Data Standard
https://open-fibre-data-standard.readthedocs.io
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International connections #72

Closed duncandewhurst closed 2 years ago

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

The supply side research surfaced several examples of datasets that include details of the international connections available at nodes:

Some publishers list only the name of the country for each connection and some list more specific locations (regions, cities, towns etc.).

Proposal

Add an internationalConnections property to Node. Make internationalConnections an array of Address objects to allow publishers to disclose locations of varying specificity. Require that .country is always populated.

Example

{
  "nodes": [
    {
      "internationalConnections": [
        {
          "region": "Mwanza",
          "country": "TZ"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
lgs85 commented 2 years ago

This sounds fine to me. I do wonder if internationalConnections is sufficiently unambiguous, but all alternatives I can think of (internationalConnectionDestinations) are a bit long. A sufficiently detailed description should be fine.

I also think we should tighten up the terminology between this and node.type, which has a 'borderCrossing' code. Maybe we change 'borderCrossing' to 'internationalConnection' in the node type codelist, and add a reference to the internationalConnections object in the relevant codelist description?

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

I think that there might be a difference between a node with international connections and a border crossing as it is currently defined:

The point at which a fibre cable crosses either an international boundary or the coastline of the operator’s country.

Whereas a node with international connections might not be located at the border, like the Nkenda node with the connection to Beni on UETCL's map:

image

So I am not sure aligning the terminology is a good idea. However, including a reference to internationalConnections in the description of the 'borderCrossing' code sounds good.

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

The alpha schema and codelists added in https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/open-fibre-data-standard/pull/101 reflect the latest proposal in this issue.

This issue will remain open against the beta milestone to gather feedback from the alpha consultation.

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

We've not heard any further feedback on this issue so I'm going to close it for now.