Solutions and Products Overview
The positive impact of VoIP service on cable operators’ basic subscriber growth rates and stock prices is indisputable testimony to the value of the service to your subscribers and your bottom line. The numbers tell the story – revenue-generating units (RGUs) in the U.S. are up almost 70% in five years, ARPUs are at a lofty $125 in some systems, and basic subs are now increasing after an extended period of retraction across the industry. These notable results reflect the “halo effect” of VoIP as the motivating service of the “bundle of joy.”
Operational Intensity
Plant managers, network engineers and customer service managers know that VoIP is not just one more service to leverage the network. The operational challenges that cable operators face today as they focus on compelling service bundles to drive penetration of multiple services and expand their customer base -- while managing the cost structure -- are brought to a new level of intensity with the deployment of VoIP across the 320 million homes passed by an HFC network worldwide. It’s a real-time, performance-sensitive, truly two-way service that is vulnerable every moment to network reliability and availability. With VoIP, the data flow is real-time in both directions, so that any dropped data means echoing, jittering or a dropped call altogether.
The scale and complexity of delivering VoIP service and other advanced services to increasingly penetrated areas highlight two now-essential requirements:
Integrated View of Network and Service Health
The delivery of VoIP over HFC requires precise and coordinated execution across many layers of disparate systems, including traditional telephony infrastructure, backbone and regional IP-based systems, head-end located IP and RF modulation/demodulation systems, and the HFC plant, of course, which is a complex network of fiber nodes, amplifiers, taps and subscriber equipment. Because of the overall system’s complexity, the process of assessing and managing real-time service health requires coordinated and intelligent analysis of the system’s configuration, faults and performance across RF, IP and dynamic QoS layers. Service management and monitoring systems deployed today, however, typically cover just one of these service dimensions, still leaving a significant investment in time and labor by network and field operations staff to manually correlate service health through multi-layered systems. With just a single-dimensional view, cable operators are forced into this resource-intensive and highly reactive effort to identify the root cause, precise location, and scope of the problem – to ultimately be able to take corrective action.
Greater Upstream Bandwidth Capacity and Availability
Delivering a two-way intensive service such as VoIP heightens the focus on another critical factor of reliable service delivery: upstream bandwidth capacity and availability. Obviously, available capacity is needed in the upstream carrier to launch and maintain a high-quality VoIP service. In many systems, however, that capacity is being crowded out – unnecessarily -- by QoS-erosive ingress. Given the way noise accumulates in an HFC network, ingress generated in even one subscriber home could make the delivery of VoIP to that entire node impossible. Even when available capacity is eventually secured, the upstream must remain reliable and “clean” of noise -- any ingress issues must be isolated, contained, and resolved immediately to avoid subscriber service credits and all of the associated operational implications.
Proactive Service Management Solution
Proxilliant’s Cable Access Management System was designed with the unique requirements of the HFC access network in mind, enabling cable operators worldwide to achieve the demanding service reliability and bandwidth availability demands for VoIP and other two-way services. With Proxilliant’s CAMS, cable operators can proactively, confidently and profitably advance toward carrier-class service performance:
- Increase available upstream bandwidth capacity potentially two-or four-fold by evolving to higher level modulation schemes -- made possible by dramatic ingress reduction.
- Generate additional service revenue by deploying VoIP and other advanced services in the newly recovered bandwidth capacity.
- Reduce troubleshooting time and cost by a dramatic 75% by precisely isolating issues through CAMS’ deep visibility into the network – from the node level to a cluster of typically 35 homes
- Advance toward carrier-class service performance with real-time and integrated visibility of service health across RF, IP and QoS.
- Control operating costs as customer base grows, with a proactive, automated, and scaleable approach to network and service health.
- Reduce service credits and downstream operational implications by downscaling impact areas from entire nodes to typically 35-home clusters
