18-19 July 2026 - Vienna, Austria.
The Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) - ofds.info - is a format to describe fibre and broadband networks for analyzing and mapping Internet resilience at the infrastructure level. Network operators use many different formats for mapping their networks. OFDS is an attempt to provide a common language. (see demonstration map)
How can you ensure a reliable and resilient Internet connection... if you do NOT know where the physical cables are? How can you know your outage risk for a natural disaster or a power outage, if you don't know the physical routes of cables? This is what OFDS can assist with.
OFDS is NOT (yet) an IETF standard. The specification was developed independently by a group of organizations including the World Bank, Mozilla, Internet Society, Internet Telecommunication Union (ITU), Liquid Intelligent Technologies, CSquared, and Digital Council Africa. The group is now seeking a permanent institutional home for OFDS in a standards development organization (SDO). They are here at IETF 126 to see if there is sufficient interest within the IETF to explore bringing it into the IETF process.
At the IETF 126 Hackathon, beyond introducing people to OFDS, we'd like to:
- Expand the Good Practice Map with more examples of maps of fibre / broadband maps.
- Digitize some of the identified maps so that they are available in OFDS and can be added to the public data sets as well as our demonstration map.
- Install, use, review, fix the open source tools that work with OFDS.
- Improve the current documentation for OFDS.
- Provide input into the next version 0.5 of OFDS. (See call for input)
Note: There is a set of OFDS public data sets that can be used to see what OFDS looks like, and for testing some of the different tools and systems.
Before getting started on projects, you want to review:
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OFDS Documentation including the Primer
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Blog post- What's New in OFDS 0.4: New Features, GeoPackage Support, and Practical Tools
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The main OFDS site, including the interactive map, news stories, and other info
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If you want to work with the current set of OFDS tools, watch this 24-minute video walking through how the tools work.
There are two parts to the mapping work. First, we want to use standard web searching / open source intelligence (OSINT) to find existing fiber / broadband maps that are out there. We want to include them in our "Good Practice Map". Then, based on those maps, we want to start digitizing them so that we can ultimately get OFDS files that we can incorporate into our OFDS demonstration map.
Ready to do some web searching? The objective is to find network maps that are out there that are not yet known. In some countries regulators may have these maps, but usually it is the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) / network operators who may have these maps. Often, they just simply are not posted online.
Tasks:
- Find broadband maps through searching.
- You can use the current map to see where maps are needed.
- Note that a country is shaded if only one map is found. There may be many more networks within a shaded country.
- Once you have found a network map, check the current map to see if it has already been entered
- Submit the map by filling out this form
Once maps have been identified, we need to turn the map into something that can be converted to OFDS. If the map is already in Google Earth, or has a KML file, we can potentially use the KML2OFDS tool (below) to generate OFDS. Otherwise, it is a process that involves tracing over the endpoints.
Note: It is also possible to do all the digitizing within QGIS, but our experience so far is that people find it easier to do within Google Earth, as outlined below.
Tasks:
Prerequisites:
- Google Earth installed.
- We have to use the desktop version of Google Earth as the web version does not yet support image overlays.
- Image map in jpg or png format of fibre optic network to digitize.
Steps for digitizing maps in Google Earth:
- Search for country where network exists in search bar and click Search. This will zoom you to the country in question.
- From the menu select Add | Image Overlay. When the dialog box opens, select Browse and look for the image map on your local system.
- The map will appear overlayed over the country you zoomed to. Don't close the dialog box.
- Adjust the transparency slider until you can see the Google map through the image but still make out key elements of the image map.
- Click and drag the green highlighted edges of the image map so that geographic elements in the image map correspond with the geography in Google Earth.
- Once the image map is ideally aligned, give the image a suitable name and click OK.
- Create a folder with the name of the network under Places on the left hand side of Google Earth. Create a Nodes and a Spans subfolder under the Network folder.
- Add Points of Presence in the Nodes folder by selected Add | Placemark from the menu. Give each node the place name of its geographic location e.g. town name, city name.
- Draw spans (fibre routes) connecting the Points of Presence, tracing the routes on the image map. Where fibre appears to follow roads, you may choose to trace the road itself. Make sure Roads is selected in the Layers window to do this. Save the routes you have drawn into the Spans folder.
- Once you have successfully traced both Nodes (Points of Presence) and Span (fibre routes), Right Click on the network folder that contains the Nodes and Spans subfolders, and select Save Place As.... Give your export a meaningful name like the name of the network and select KML not KMZ, then click Save. That's it.
Now that you have a KML file, you can potentially use the KML2OFDS tool (below) to convert the KML to OFDS. After that, the OFDS file can be added to the OFDS public data sets.
Note: You can watch this 24-minute video to see the steps involved.
There are several open source tools that work with OFDS. The tasks in the Hackathon would be to test out the tools, raise issues if you experience any problems or have suggestions, review the documentation, and offer changes.
KML2OFDS is a Python script for converting KML maps of fibre optic network infrastructure into OFDS. A typical workflow might involve digitizing a map using Google Earth (see above) to then generate a KML file. The next step is to take that KML file and run it through KML2OFDS to get the resulting ODFS files.
The tool is found in the repo: https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/kml2ofds
Tasks:
- Install
KML2OFDSand get it running. - Review the documentation and raise any issues
- Review current issues and see if you can assist with more info or a PR.
- Modify the code to add functionality (using an issue and PR).
OFDS Studio is a plugin for creating and editing OFDS data using the free and open-source GIS tool QGIS, you can:
- Create OFDS data from scratch
- Import and edit an existing OFDS dataset
- Check that the data conforms to the OFDS data model
- Export OFDS data in GeoPackage and JSON formats.
You can also leverage QGIS’s powerful suite of GIS features to trace and digitise raster maps, transform non-OFDS datasets into OFDS format, and combine your OFDS data with a range of basemaps and geospatial datasets to perform spatial analysis and processing.
The code for OFDS Studio is in this repo: https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/ofds-qgis-plugin
Tasks:
- Install OFDS Studio (and QGIS if necessary) and raise any issues found during installation
- Browse the current set of issues to see if you can help.
- Raise any issues and or send a PR for any improvements or suggestions.
CoVE (Convert, Validate, and Explore) is an online tool that performs validation on OFDS files to ensure they are correct. It can be found at https://cove.ofds.info - or it can be installed locally using Docker.
The code base is in the repo: https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/cove-ofds Issues are at: https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/cove-ofds/issues
Tasks:
- Use COVE - https://cove.ofds.info - and raise issues if you have feedback.
- Explore the list of current issues to see if you can help.
With the release of OFDS version 0.4 in April 2026 (announcement), the group is now looking for how OFDS should evolve for the next 0.5 version. You can help provide input!
Tasks:
- Read the Call for Inputs into 0.5
- Provide feedback on any of the listed open issues, particularly:
- Add any additional suggestions to the list of open issues
The current OFDS documentation has been developed over time, but could certainly use new sets of eyes. The task here will be to read through the docs and offer suggestions to make them better / simpler / easier-to-understan.
Tasks:
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Review current documentation at https://standard.ofds.info/en/latest/
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Go to where documentation currently is in this repo: https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/open-fibre-data-standard/tree/0.4-dev/docs
- Raise issues
- Open a pull request with suggestions
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This can also be done for the OFDS Developer Handbook
The open source tools identified above could be virtualized so that they could be easily installed via Docker or similar technologies.
There are MANY other things that can be done with OFDS. A few suggestions are below.
- Create a tool / plugin / module that will export into OFDS?
- Add OFDS export into an existing tool?
- Import OFDS into Open Street Map?
- Import OFDS into Open Infrastructure Map? - https://openinframap.org