Open Fibre Standards#

Warren Finch

• Why: Cyclone Gabrielle exposed what happens when nobody has a shared, structured view of physical fibre — shared corridors, thin diversity, no cross-operator picture. An open, machine-readable fibre data schema matters for resilience planning and is conceptually adjacent to how the PM thinks about infrastructure-as-data (and useful for DC site/diversity analysis).
• What: An introduction to the Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS): a common, open schema for describing terrestrial fibre infrastructure — routes, nodes, ownership attributes — interoperable and machine-readable, presented from a New Zealand resilience-planning perspective (from abstract only).
• How: A standardised data model that lets fibre data be shared, analysed, and reused across operators, regulators, researchers, and emergency planners, supporting coordination and post-incident analysis.
• Where applicable: The schema is general; the value depends on operators actually publishing their data, which is the hard part. Relevant wherever physical-route diversity is a resilience question — NZ context is the motivating case, not a constraint.