“I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.”
Anish Kapoor.
Whilst a utility (eg rail, electricity, water, mining, etc) will have many facets of similarity with CSPs, the one major difference tends to be that it will have far fewer customers/subscribers on its network. This has a number of implications when considering what tools are required.
For example, modules supporting service management, CRM (customer relationship management), SLA (service level agreement) management and others may not be so relevant.
However, the one aspect that these entities generally require with much higher precedence is spatial representation of physical assets such as cables, ducts, tray-way, pits, manholes, etc. This is because the utility may have other systems (eg electrical, fire suppression, other plant, etc) that it manages in addition to their communications assets. These systems will tend to be more physical in nature and may not have a need for higher order concepts such as circuit hierarchies like a CSP has to deal with.
In complex plant environments, these physical assets may even need to be mapped in three-dimensional spatial representations to ensure appropriate separations and trayway/riser sharing can occur without impacting the other systems.