Cable multiservice operators (MSOs) have embraced the need for broadband data, and with good reason. Broadband data demand is expected to grow by 560 percent over the next five years, according to a recent Bell Labs study, largely driven by demand for pay TV and video and cloud traffic generated from the proliferation of data centers.
Cable MSOs are doing well by their entertainment services bundled with residential broadband offers, but this revenue is under siege by the likes over over-the-top (OTT) video services such as Netflix and Apple. Hence, cable MSOs are constantly in search of new revenue opportunities.
One strong candidate for new revenue is commercial services for small and medium-sized business (SMBs). This area generated 10 percent of MSO revenue in 2014, according to Gilbert Marciano, CMO Strategic Marketing - Customer & Market Insight Senior Manager at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent TechZine posting appropriately titled, Differentiate your SMB services with big data. In fact, it is noted that in the U.S. Comcast and Time Warner Cable together generated roughly $5.5 billion from the segment in 2013.
Specifically cited is the reality that cable MSOs are in a good place to offer cloud analytics services, since the infrastructure requirements to properly leverage big data is not cheap. Cable MSOs already have this critical infrastructure and thus have the ability to offer SMB analytics as a cloud service.
To offer such analytics services, however, cable MSOs must address the architectural challenge of connecting hundreds of geographically dispersed SMBs. As Marciano notes, this can be done with a distributed datacenter architecture that is connected by a multi-country IP network in the cloud.
“An ideal solution is to deploy software-defined networking (SDN), which brings this elasticity and automation,” Marciano explains. “Network elements are implemented as software (virtual machines) on a distributed cloud infrastructure whilst SDN brings scaling, responsiveness, and automation to the required interconnectivity.”
This removes the boundaries throughout and across the data centers, dynamically provisioning for a high number of separate VLANs, low bandwidth, high latency, and lack of resilience.
“It is suited to situations with highly volatile usage patterns and where resources requirements increase/decrease depending on loads,” says, Marciano. “This solution creates opportunity for cable operators.”
Indeed it does, and with cable MSOs already making significant headway in the business broadband sector, particularly with SMBs, analytics is a natural addition to their solutions portfolios.
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The customer experience has always mattered, but its importance has grown in recent years. This has been driven by increased global competition, including the almost instant availability of alternations, and the rising expectations by fickle and informed consumer. Yet, cable operators have a long way to travel if they want to deliver the customer experience (CX) that consumers demand.
The Temkin Group’s Q3 2014 survey of 10,000 US consumers’ opinions about goods and services registered the lowest ranking average Net Promoter Score (NPS) for pay TV providers, a telling statistic. Internet service providers did almost as poorly, coming in only one position higher.
“As technology innovations drive shifts in consumer behavior and open new service opportunities, operators must start eliminating pain points,” stressed Alcatel-Lucent’s Nicholas Cadwgan in a recent TechZine article, Cable MSOs transform the customer experience. “This includes any obstacles that will impede their ability to launch and provide adequate care and quality assurance for those services.”
Cadwgan lays out four customer experience management (CEM) areas that cable operators should focus on.
“This means operators must have comprehensive control of and visibility into every device and every service delivered to those devices from their networks,” he noted.
2. Basic customer service has to be improved, including help desks, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and self-help portals.
“To provide CSRs all the information they need to reduce resolution time, the new CEM platform must have powerful analytics capabilities in conjunction with data-gathering that reaches across all devices and systems,” suggested Cadwgan.
Analytics systems need to be able to track and identify issues based on information relevant to whatever access link a particular user is on, and the operator’s CX system must be able to aggregate and present all relevant information from a user-centric viewpoint.
The customer experience matters, and cable operators better start taking it seriously if CX statistics are to be believed.
For more of Cadwgan’s thought about opportunities transformation can afford cable operators you are invited to listen to the following podcast on the subject.
The increasingly competitive broadband market has service providers facing new challenges as they deliver services to today’s Internet-connected home. One challenge is delivering technical support for the rapidly increasing number of Internet-connected devices in the home. Consumers are now connecting gaming consoles, smart phones, tablets and other devices to their residential gateway, and their broadband Internet service. In light of this increasingly complex and dynamic technological landscape, it is no surprise that service providers have turned to analytics to better understand their customers’ needs.
Gaining a 360° view of one’s customers via analytics is quickly becoming one of the only ways to provide a service that is differentiated from competitors. Customer Experience Management tools are being used to comprehensively manage a customer’s cross-channel exposure, interaction, and transactions with a company, with the ultimate goal of optimizing these interactions from the customer’s perspective and, as a result, fostering customer loyalty.
On September 25, I will have the privilege of speaking at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver regarding the use of analytics to optimize the customer experience in the connected home. The Cable-Tec Expo is the cable telecommunications engineering show of the year. It provides the opportunity to discover and learn first-hand about the latest in cable telecommunications technology. I will be attending on behalf of the Alcatel-Lucent Motive team, with the objective of delivering information about our cutting edge products in the realm of customer experience analytics.
The array of devices being used in today’s connected home is generating a great deal of valuable information for service providers. This key data and analytics can be used by operators for managing the connected home in relation to:
The ultimate goal of mining and transforming this data is to create meaningful, actionable insights that can be used to quickly identify anomalies and resolve issues. As operators begin to apply analytics to the customer experience they will be able to create and maintain a culture of customer experience (CX) excellence that is aligned with CX business goals and metrics. Not only that, but they will gain the ability to manage the subscriber experience proactively and predictively in order to continuously improve customer care processes and technologies.
Essentially, the Motive CX analytics framework for optimizing the customer experience in the connected home can be broken down into four categories:
The conclusion is that the use of analytics can have a meaningful influence on subscriber retention and revenue if properly deployed. In my presentation, I will delve further into the above four categories to show you how to best harness device, network, and services data in the connected home to extract valuable, actionable insights with speed and precision. With the churn rate at 89% for subscribers who have had a poor customer experience, more focus than ever needs to be paid to using analytics as a means of improving customer satisfaction and retention.
Hope to see you there!
Alan
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Kabel Deutschland (KD), a Vodafone company, is a good example of what cable multiple system operators must do to gracefully manage growing demand and continue to deliver innovative new services by upgrading their network edge for IP services.
As highlighted in a recent TechZine article by Steve Davidson, European Marketing Director for Cable, Alcatel-Lucent, KD’s investment in infrastructure and cable services had already paid great dividends. The company’s initial 100 Mb/s product offering had a take-rate approaching 50 percent. But with this positive consumer response came some new challenges.
Among these challenges were managing cable operator costs and subscriber growth, supporting legacy cable services, and accelerating IP service deployment. How the cable company dealt with these problems and did so in the context of having a vision of its IP services future is worth studying.
First, KD knew that it needed to continue to support subscriber growth from its current base of 8.4 million connected households in Germany, so it adopted a flexible, simplified edge architecture that enabled it to address scaling, cost and functionality issues at the edge of its network to help manage its growing business.
Second, supporting legacy services was important for the cable MSO even while it increasingly rolled out ultra-broadband for cable, so KD looked for an architecture that would support both legacy IPv4 and new IPv6.
The company also wanted to make sure the new architecture had the flexibility to accommodate long-term growth and next generation service delivery without compromising KD’s reputation for high performance and high value services, and the company found it with Alcatel-Lucent’s cable MSO solutions.
Third, KD needed to accelerate deployment. The company studied future market needs and analyzed the options available for both the near and longer term, and opted for highly redundant clusters of dual-stack edge devices in an architecture that can separate IP service routing from the access technology.
“This approach can also simplify the existing cable hub and make it possible for KD to deliver personalized and differentiated services across whichever access technologies are in use,” noted Anderson in his article. “The solution resolved KD’s immediate IPv4 address challenges and set up the company for a high growth IP services future that included the use of IPv6.”
The separation of service routing and access helped speed up deployment of IP services and allowed KD to migrate smoothly to whichever new technologies evolve down the line.
]]>“GM factories reduce production in aftermath of Japan earthquake 2011”, “Hard disk shortage due to Thailand flooding 2012“, “Drug shortages continue to vex doctors”, “China factory fire sends memory chip prices to three-year high (2013)”. Industrial supply chains are becoming increasingly tenuous as they are thinned out and stretched across the globe. Raw materials are available from fewer and fewer specialized suppliers and warehouses are eliminated for just-in-time production. Small, local incidents affect the supply of goods on a global scale.
In the IT industry we are seeing a similar trend. Enterprises are moving their applications and data to the cloud, but this cloud is often highly centralized and not as resilient, free flowing, or efficient as one might think. Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider in the world, is serving their global customers from no more than two handfuls of locations. Netflix and other companies have experienced major outages due to single failures in the cloud they used.
So what does this mean for NFV?
Traditionally, telco networks have been highly distributed with thousands of central offices spread across the country. But today’s high-speed fiber connections and powerful server farms give service providers the option to re-architect and potentially centralize their network. Clearly, highly centralized deployments are cheaper to manage than many small, scattered locations. But what works for many Web and Internet services is not always the best choice for carrier grade services such as mobile voice, video and data for the enterprise.
Telefonica and Alcatel-Lucent have analyzed factors, such as latency, high availability, and security, that determine geographical placement decisions for different applications in telco networks. NFV and cloud technologies allow service providers to choose the best locations depending on the needs of the applications, and avoid the kind of dramatic effects that we are seeing in other industries. At the end of the day this is a supply chain and logistics challenge where ensuring goods are available to users whenever they want them, the supplier with a short delivery chain, i.e., a distributed network, tends to be the most successful.
To manage the cost of a distributed architecture, service providers need an NFV and SDN platform that automates infrastructure and application lifecycle and provides an aggregate view of the distributed NFV resources. Since its launch in 2012, Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand NFV Platform, together with the Nuage Networks SDN Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), has been designed for this type of flexible, distributed NFV network architecture.
For more details, read the Telefonica/Alcatel-Lucent white paper “Why distribution matters in NFV”. Related postings include:
]]>There are two kinds of technology consumers: Those who revel in the technology, and those who just want the benefits of the technology without having to think about tech itself.
While I definitely am someone who enjoys the technological innovation as much as the results of that innovation, most consumers are not. They just want technology that works, i.e., where the proof of the viability of next generation capabilities can be summed up as “seeing is believing.”
One example of this is the increasing popularity of multiscreen entertainment as delivered over a leading-edge multiscreen video platform such as the Alcatel-Lucent one that has become with service providers around the world. Consumers don’t want to have to fiddle with their computer or TV to get their content from one device to the next. They just want it to work; consumers want to be able to walk around the house with their shows or take their entertainment out into the world via their smartphone, not unlike we’ve been able to do with hardbound books for generations.
Thankfully, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DNLA) is making that relatively easy for consumers nowadays. DNLA helps specify the standard for enabling the sharing of music, video clips and photos across devices.
Earlier this year DNLA released guidelines for its Commercial Video Profile-2 (CVP-2). CVP-2 lets pay TV operators share premium content across devices inside a subscriber’s home, opening up much greater sharing of content across devices.
The release of these guidelines is a crucial step in the evolution of cloud TV and away from a device-centric model toward a cloud model where content follows the consumer.
As a recent TechZine article by Roland Mestric, Director, Multimedia Solutions Marketing, Global Corporate Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, titled DLNA CVP-2: Addressing the Multiscreen Challenge, noted, CVP-2 will start in the form of home-based gateways to process the content according to the devices used. The gateway will also act as the DLNA server, streaming content to these devices inside the home.
However, “the next logical step will be to move the processing and streaming functions of the DLNA server into the network,” the article noted. “Pay TV operators can then prepare the content in a central location, from which they can serve each device and have a better control over the delivery mechanism.”
DNLA and its new CVP-2 guidelines will in very short order open up the way that consumers consume media, effectively liberating content from a single device or group of devices. As Mestric explains in a podcast on the subject, while this will cut down on the geek factor of moving content between devices, for the majority of consumers this will be a big win.
]]>Bright House Networks loved its 1G Ethernet passive optical network (EPON). But there was just one problem: demand was increasing, and 1G EPON was quickly becoming not enough.
The cable multiple system operator, the sixth largest owner and operator of cable systems in the United States, serves roughly 2.5 million subscribers with its video, high-speed data, home security and automation and voice services.
Bright House Networks is a proponent of EPON because it allows the company to provision multiple customers onto one fiber and still provide dedicated bandwidth without oversubscription. It is their preferred way to accelerate the transformation of their network to an all IP ultra-broadband infrastructure.
“We’re big fans of EPON because it fundamentally lowers the cost of our last mile infrastructure to provide fiber-based services to commercial businesses,” Craig Cowden, senior VP of network engineering, operations and enterprise solutions at Bright House, said in a recent case study. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving. There are benefits from day one.”
But increasing bandwidth needs, especially from cellular providers trying to meet mobile video demand, were starting to require ultra-broadband for cable that reached speeds beyond 300 Mb per tower. This required 10G EPON.
Bright House selected Alcatel-Lucent for the upgrade, and this has led the company to use the Alcatel-Lucent 7360 Intelligent Services Access Manager (ISAM) FX product family card and optical network unit (ONU). The solution can simultaneously support multiple fiber technologies including 1G EPON, GPON, CWDMP2P and 10G-EPON, and the 7360 ISAM FX also has DOCSIS provisioning of EPON (DPoE) integrated into the platform.
By having DPoE integrated, Bright House will be more easily able to provision and support fiber-based services on a greater scale. It also will reduce operational expenses by allowing them to activate and manage EPON-based network services while using DOCSIS-based back office systems.
“Alcatel-Lucent really helped us to be near the leading edge with that solution, and the 10G EPON solution we’re currently deploying from Alcatel-Lucent will help match our enterprise customer and cellular backhaul capacity requirements for the foreseeable future,” noted Cowden.
The 10G EPON service will initially be used to provide commercial business services for enterprise customers. But it also will be used for purely symmetrical services that are generally not technically feasible with many other access technologies, use both 1G and multi-G services on the same EPON link, leverage higher individual speed services, and deliver guaranteed high-bandwidth throughput for mission-critical end-user applications.
Bright House knows it must always stay ahead of demand, however, so plans are already being considered for 100G deployment.
“We have traditionally been an early investor in next gen network technologies that enable capabilities that set us above the competition,” said Cowden. “10G EPON with DPoE continues that legacy, and we look forward to continuing that technology journey to solve our customers’ needs.”
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