Route Determination in Katapult Pro: Comparing Candidate Routes

A veteran OSP designer can drive a corridor at 25 miles an hour and call the route from the windshield, because years of surveying poles and designing jobs have taught them what a crowded crossarm, a short pole, or a tight midspan over a state road will cost once make ready starts. That skill is real, it is scarce, and it is the reason route determination has been so hard to scale across the markets a broadband program needs to open at once. Every route that gets called wrong shows up months later as complex make ready, a pole replacement, or a permit that stalls the whole segment.

This post pulls together two earlier pieces we wrote on the subject: why route determination is a scalability problem in the first place, and the five-step workflow we use to solve it in Katapult Pro. The short version is that we moved the expert's judgment from the truck to the office, where it can sit on top of measurable photos of every candidate route instead of a glance out the window. If you want the platform view first, our engineering design tools are where the route comparison lands.

What route determination means in aerial OSP design

Route determination is the process of choosing which poles a new attachment will follow between the points a network has to connect, weighing distance, make ready exposure, pole owner standards, permit obstacles, and the cost of going underground wherever aerial doesn't work. The goal is a route that gets the plant from point A to point B at a predictable cost, not the shortest line on the map.

Making that call well means holding a lot of information at once: the client's existing plant, the locations that need to be served, every NESC clearance rule that applies, the distribution standards of each pole owner on the route, and a working estimate of what it costs to trench or bore the stretches where the poles won't cooperate. Traditionally one experienced designer carried all of that in their head and made hundreds of small decisions per route, often from the truck.

The decisions matter because make ready is where route economics show up. As we wrote in our post on using Katapult Pro for OTMR applications, there aren't always many options when planning a build, but avoiding certain situations can save tens of thousands of dollars and months of permitting headaches. A route that threads through poles with no make ready moves quickly through the owner's process; a route that collects electrical make ready and replacements at every other pole becomes a budget problem and a timeline problem at the same time.

Why route determination is hard to scale

The expertise behind a good route call comes from surveying thousands of poles and designing hundreds of jobs across different markets, and it takes years to become comfortable weighing all of those factors at once. Most broadband deployment projects don't have years of runway, which means a firm bidding on upcoming work has traditionally needed several expert designers already on staff before it could say yes. Because that expertise takes so long to build, scaling up and down with the peaks and valleys of the industry has been a persistent challenge for engineering firms.

Our answer, on our own projects first, was to keep the expertise in the office. When every pole on a candidate route is documented with measurable photos tied to true geolocations, a less experienced designer can make a sound route decision from a desk, with a senior designer available to review the hard poles. One or two experienced project managers can then float between teams of junior designers working in several markets at once, without the windshield time or the travel expense that used to come with being the person who had to see every pole.

The field side gets easier to staff at the same time. Collecting the data well depends mostly on safe practices and disciplined photo documentation rather than on engineering judgment, so teams can hire for character and work ethic, get value from new employees quickly, and move people into processing and design as they learn the plant. That staffing model only works when the platform carries the knowledge the designer used to carry alone, which is what the workflow below is built to do.

Route determination in Katapult Pro, step by step

This is how the workflow runs on our own servers and on our customers' projects. The sequence matters more than any single tool in it, because the point is that every candidate route gets costed on real field conditions before anyone commits to it.

1. Import the locations you need to serve

Start by getting the service area and the intended locations onto the map. Katapult Pro lets you drag a KMZ, a shapefile, or a CSV directly onto the job to seed pole locations and connections, or bring the same files in as imported layers to use as reference while you design. Reference layers such as pole owner data or serving area boundaries can be stored at the company level in the Model Editor so every job can load them, and you control whether clicking a feature pulls up its source data. Our pre-design guide covers each import path in detail, including the CSV formatting the importer expects.

2. Design candidate routes from the office

With the intended path visible, use the aerial design tools to place poles along each potential route that would get the plant from point A to point B. Pre-design runs on aerial imagery and Street View, so a designer can place poles, lock span distances and bearings, and spot taps, references, and obvious congestion before anyone drives the route. Where parallel pole lines exist, draw two or three alternatives in the same job rather than one. Aerial and underground segments can be designed together, which keeps the stretches where you expect to bore or trench inside the same comparison instead of in a separate spreadsheet.

This is also the moment to leave notes for the field crew: guying and anchor options to check, crossings worth extra photos, and any pole you couldn't see clearly in imagery flagged to verify its location in the field. Doing the design at a desk instead of on a phone in bad weather puts the crew in the best position to collect cleanly.

3. Collect every candidate route in one field pass

The crew deploys to the locations you designed, following the walkout mapping to navigate from pole to pole, and photographs the existing conditions at each one with the calibration reference in the frame. Because the two-person crew isn't measuring or making engineering decisions at the pole, our teams routinely document 125 or more poles a day, which means collecting two or three candidate routes in the same trip costs very little compared with sending a crew back once a route is chosen. On upload, every photo is associated to its pole location automatically; our post on photo management for pole data collection explains how the time bucket and sync shot workflow handles that at volume. The data collection platform page covers the field side end to end.

4. Process photos and propose make ready for each path

Back in the office, the photofirst team classifies and calibrates each photo, annotators mark attachment heights and equipment, and designers propose the new attachment on every pole along every candidate route. Katapult Pro auto-flags clearance violations against NESC or GO 95 and the pole owner's own standards across the whole project, recalculates make ready violations in bulk as moves are proposed, and updates midspan heights over critical crossings automatically. When moves can't resolve a pole, the designer proposes a replacement from the same panel.

Because the violations are flagged and the proposed moves are visible on the photo, a junior designer can call basic make ready with confidence and hand the complicated poles to the senior designer, who reviews them from the same screen without a site visit. Every proposed move is tracked, so the review is a conversation about specific poles rather than a second opinion formed from memory. The Katapult Method describes how we split this work across a team.

5. Read the make ready heat map and choose the route

As make ready is proposed, each pole's map style updates, and the design becomes a make ready heat map across every candidate path. In the configuration we use, green nodes carry no make ready, yellow nodes carry communications-space make ready, and red nodes carry complex electrical make ready. The pattern across a route is readable at a glance, and the comparison between two routes is usually obvious before anyone opens a spreadsheet.

Not all complex make ready is avoidable, so the heat map informs the decision rather than making it. When a closer look is needed, the make ready notifications report gives a one-click breakdown of simple and complex make ready with OTMR categorization, which tells you how much of each route qualifies for one-touch make ready, and the cost estimation tools tie proposed moves to compatible units so the colors on the map turn into a bill of materials and a dollar figure. Where a pole owner requires loading analysis, the chosen route can run through the integrated pole loading engine or export to SPIDAcalc, O-Calc Pro, or PoleForeman, so the full analysis is spent on the route you'll build instead of every alternative.

Your next route comparison doesn't need a second truck roll. Design the candidates in the office, collect them in one pass, and let the make ready heat map show where each path gets expensive before construction does. Book a call with our team to run a real project through the workflow, or see how the engineering design tools fit together.

What the heat map doesn't decide

The heat map reads make ready exposure, which is the biggest variable in most aerial routes, but it isn't the only one. Permit lead times differ by pole owner and by crossing type, so a railroad or state highway crossing can cost more time than a dozen yellow poles. A segment with light make ready may still belong underground because of access or future capacity, and a route through poles with preexisting violations can raise questions about who performs the correction before the new attachment goes up. Transfers already in progress and double wood on the route can also block access until they're resolved, whatever the colors say.

The designer still makes the final call, and the senior project manager still reviews it. What changes is the evidence underneath the call: every pole on every candidate route is a measured, photographed record, so the decision can be explained to a client, revisited when conditions change, and defended if the pole owner's reviewer asks why this path and not the other one.

Who does the work when the expertise stays in the office

Running route determination this way changes who can contribute at each stage. Field technicians need strong safety practices and photo discipline more than years of design experience. Processors classify and annotate photos as the first step in learning the plant. Junior designers propose attachments and basic make ready, and one or two senior designers or project managers review the hard poles across every market the team is working in. People move along that path as they get comfortable, which is how we grow designers instead of waiting to hire them.

Teams that would rather not build that bench right away can run the same workflow with our help. Our engineering services team designs and fields routes in the platform every day, and the data lands in the same job your team can pick up later.

Frequently asked questions

What is route determination in OSP design?

Route determination is the process of choosing which poles a new aerial attachment will follow between the points a network has to connect. It weighs distance, make ready exposure on each pole, pole owner standards, permit obstacles such as railroad and highway crossings, and the cost of going underground where aerial attachment isn't practical.

Can Katapult Pro collect more than one candidate route in a single field visit?

Yes. Candidate routes are designed in the office as separate paths in the same job, and the field crew photographs every pole on every path in one trip. Because photo collection is fast and the engineering decisions happen later, collecting an alternative route costs far less than returning to field it after the first choice falls through.

How does the make ready heat map work?

As designers propose attachments and make ready on each pole, the pole's map style updates based on the kind of make ready required. Poles with none, poles with communications-space moves, and poles with complex electrical make ready each display differently, so the map shows where a route gets expensive at a glance, and the make ready notifications report and cost estimation tools put numbers behind the colors.

Does route determination in Katapult Pro cover underground segments?

Aerial and underground segments can be designed in the same job, so a route that goes underground for a few spans stays inside one comparison. The make ready heat map and clearance checks apply to the aerial poles; the cost of underground segments comes from the designer's estimate for that stretch rather than from an automated calculation.

How does this workflow fit one-touch make ready?

The make ready notifications report categorizes proposed moves by simple and complex make ready and flags which qualify for OTMR, so a team can see how much of each candidate route could move through the one-touch process. That makes OTMR eligibility one of the factors in choosing a route rather than something discovered after the application is filed.

Run your next route through the platform

Route determination used to depend on the one person who could see the whole picture from the truck. In Katapult Pro the picture is built from measurable photos of every candidate route, the make ready exposure is visible on the map, and the expert's time goes to the poles that need it, which lets a team scale design across markets without waiting years to grow another expert for each one.

If you have a route to compare, book a call with our team and bring the KMZ; we can walk through the comparison on a real project. If you'd rather start with the mechanics, the Katapult Pro pre-design guide shows how to seed locations and draw candidate routes before your first field day.