What is outside plant (OSP)?
Outside plant, or OSP, is everything in a fiber or telecom network that lives outside the walls of a building: the cable, conduit, poles, handholes, pedestals and splices in the ground and on the poles. It is the construction half of the network, as opposed to the electronics inside.
A network splits into two worlds. Inside plant is the gear in a building or a hut: the electronics that light the fiber. Outside plant, OSP, is the physical path that carries it to the customer: the cable itself, what protects it, and every structure along the way. When people talk about a fiber build, the digging and the placing and the splicing, they are talking about OSP.
The three ways plant goes in
- Aerial. Cable lashed to a strand between poles, with guys and anchors to hold the poles against the tension. The work is up in the air and measured mostly by the foot.
- Buried. Cable put directly in the ground by plow or trench, or pushed through a bore under a road or a driveway, then covered to a required depth.
- Underground. Cable pulled through existing conduit between manholes and handholes. No digging the whole run, just access at the ends.
The structures
Between the spans sit the things a crew builds and a locator finds later: handholes and vaults for access and slack, pedestals and cabinets where cable is broken out, splice closures where fibers are joined, and service drops that run the last piece to a home. Each is its own work item on the build.
How a build is tracked
An OSP build is measured, not estimated: feet of each placement method, a count of every structure, a depth of cover on every bore, and a record of every splice. That record is what gets a build accepted and paid, which is why the scope is written in countable work items from the start. The free fiber scope sheet builder lists the standard OSP work items so you can assemble a scope in the same language the build is tracked and billed in.