Expert panelists at last week’s OSP Expo agreed the home is not a friendly place for network operators. Nonetheless, led by vice president and editorial director of OSP magazine, Sharon Vollman, the panel examined whether the seemingly inevitable extension of the outside plant into the home was more opportunity than nightmare.
Participating on the panel were Lee Hicks, vice president of video network services at Verizon Communications Inc.; Tom White, vice president of engineering at Consolidated Communications; David Carnevale, president of Market Vision Consulting; and Jack Field, vice president of carrier Americas product management for Global Connectivity Solutions at ADC.
Carnevale said telecom service providers have an opportunity to gain on cable providers, which he said are in crisis mode because they have not kept up with the pace of speed increases of fiber networks and will need $100 million to carry out the implementation of DOCSIS 3.0.
Hicks said the key to making home networking viable is to “make the home carrier-class, but at CPE prices.”
Hicks echoed the sentiments of fellow Verizon exec Claire Beth Nogay (senior vice president and chief network officer of Verizon Telecom) from the previous day’s activities. “In the media space, we are still small so we focus on quality and customer services,” he said.
Focusing on quality and creating a carrier-class customer premises will require the creation of something that doesn’t yet exist: an element management system for the CPE. He’s hoping for continued developments on products building to the WAN management technical specification known as TR-069, which will allow service providers to do better surveillance as well as proactive fixes and upgrades.
Hicks also said the explosion of new devices and demand for bandwidth puts a strain on the local loop, which shows that going fiber all the way was the right choice. “However, the core routers become strained too, so we also have to focus on quality there,” he said.
It is there in the core, Carnevale said, that the cable providers fall down. “The cable guys just don’t get it. Their backbone networks are just not very good,” he said. “And to fix something in the home, you have to be able to get at it.”
Consolidated Communications’ White calls the in-home network the final frontier. He said one of the lessons his company had to learn was that the customer doesn’t necessarily appreciate the complexity of in-home networking. “The customer doesn’t want to sit at home all day having people walking through their home,” he said.
This becomes important because, White said, when you are the guy working inside the home, the customer perceives your brand as everything in the home. “You have to accept responsibility for the perception that you now own that home [network.]”
ADC’s Field calls that being “the guardian of your brand.” He said that’s why ADC is focused on developing technology that lets the technician get in and get out. “We have to break the back of the labor problem,” he said.
The challenge for ADC and other CPE vendors is building repeatable solutions in an environment that requires customized solutions, such as in the multiple dwelling unit, which makes up 75 percent of the current market being served by FTTH.
Carnevale said as service providers extend into the home it can’t lose track of other customer-facing interactions. “If something is easy to do, people will do more of it, so it is important to focus on all the touch points, no matter how frustrating the customer can be.”
Consolidated Communications has done a few things to reduce the time technicians spend in homes as well as how many times they have to go there. First they changed their configuration from one using individual set-top boxes to one using a gateway; this reduced the installation time. The company also began re-using the coaxial cable inside the home and reduced truck roles by 83 percent.
Hicks said the remote diagnostic and auto-provisioning capabilities have been huge in reducing the cost of installation.
