Home network management is a gap that many CSPs are attempting to bridge as the residential broadband service segment evolves to support more than a basic broadband pipe into the home.
The home network is increasingly getting more complex. Today’s routine challenge of setting up and securing a Wi-Fi network with a few PCs, printers and laptops will in retrospect seem like a simple task for most consumers in a few years. Communications service providers (CSPs) could and should play an important role in realizing that goal.
IP services for voice and video applications are making their way into the home as well. VoIP gateways, set-top boxes, wireless routers, DSL and cable premise equipment have been deployed in the home as the consumer entertainment industry matures. We can expect the connected home of the future to become even more complex. Webcam surveillance and the proliferation of IPTV will bring further complications in the configuration and troubleshooting of home networks. Looking further out, femtocells are a viable option for a more cost-effective backhaul technology. The consequence of more intelligent devices in the home will shift the demarcation point beyond the customer premises equipment as CSPs grapple with solving quality and reliability issues.
Following are four important questions about why grappling with this new challenge is both necessary and achievable.
Can residential broadband advanced services succeed without the use of home network management?
No, not if CSPs want to provide more value to the consumer than a simple Internet connection. CSPs face two critical business issues – one is the cost to set up the service and the second is the ability to assure quality inside the home. The labor cost alone to set up IPTV in a greenfield deployment can take a day or more to complete. New entrants can’t pass along install cost to the consumer, so the CSP must bury it in the customer acquisition cost and hope that customers renew the service beyond the contract period. New services often generate false positive calls into the call centers immediately following the activation process. Home network management can eliminate the need for a second dispatch.
Customer loyalty is determined on price and service. IPTV brings with it much higher sensitivity to delay and latency. Most of the problems associated with delay and priority of service will occur in the last mile to the home which includes connectivity in the home. In the last mile, bandwidth is constrained so CSPs will set a maximum throughput rate for each IPTV and VoIP session to avoid exceeding bandwidth thresholds. But devices in the path will burst packets, adding jitter and overflowing buffers. This often results in packet discards which lead to pixelization and voice clipping. VoIP gateways are still not as reliable as PSTN services and often require resets to clear buffer problems that lead to an upstream IP connection failure. Any one of these types of issues increases customer dissatisfaction and customer loyalty suffers. To effectively measure the customer experience, CSPs must be able to monitor the devices in the home, isolate problems, update firmware and change configuration settings.
