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IPTV Deployments Featured Article
May 20, 2008
Real Providers: Customer Service and Competitive Challenges
By Jagan Jagannathan, Founder, Chief Technology Officer
I recently attended a conference focused on issues concerning regional and rural service providers. It was a great opportunity to get a concentrated view of the real issues service providers are facing in today’s competitive market. After listening to many presentations and chatting with other attendees at lunch and throughout the show, two key themes emerged.
First, competition is raging in rural broadband markets, and triple-play bundles are table stakes to attract and retain customers. Cable providers, long focused on dense urban markets, now view the “rest of America” as an expansion strategy. Well known as video providers, these big-name companies can bundle in Internet access and voice and leave the incumbent service provider in the cold. Therefore, incumbent service providers themselves have to be vigorous in the bundling and marketing of their advanced service solutions in their installed base.
Winning the subscriber is only the first part of the challenge for incumbent providers, as the magnitude of what it truly takes to support IPTV (News - Alert) and video on demand (VoD) are only now becoming apparent with customer uptake of these new services. When providers offer VoIP
and IPTV, expectations change and the responsiveness of the customer support organization (CSO) becomes critical.
and IPTV, expectations change and the responsiveness of the customer support organization (CSO) becomes critical. A rural provider with 70 employees might not have difficulty serving 10,000 access lines for voice and Internet access, but add in TV and video, and the ballgame changes dramatically. While it might be mildly annoying for some if the latest photographs for the grandparents are sluggish to upload, many subscribers have higher expectations when viewing “American Idol” or NASCAR and get truly angry if the video quality is not pristine. Almost every weekend there is another “mission-critical” IPTV event that viewers eagerly anticipate. Since they generally know their incumbent carrier as neighbors, there’s no escape for telco personnel if there are problems with the service quality.
event that viewers eagerly anticipate. Since they generally know their incumbent carrier as neighbors, there’s no escape for telco personnel if there are problems with the service quality. This is why visibility “beyond the demarcation point” is so important for troubleshooting real-time services. For rapid problem identification and resolution, providers need the ability to see every endpoint and application that has potential to degrade IPTV services. Xangati (News - Alert) addressed this issue with the introduction of its Virtual Task Manager application in March 2008. For a firsthand account of how VTM works in a service provider network, I invite you to listen to this video clip from EATEL.
A second theme that clearly emerged among providers revolved around the old 80/20 rule, whereby 20 percent of subscribers use about 80 percent of the bandwidth and other telco resources. Here peer-to-peer networking is the big headache. A basic consumer subscriber doing peer-to-peer file sharing ends up with a bandwidth usage pattern much closer to that of a business, but at a fraction of the price. The problem is that these service providers are constrained by the principles of network neutrality which in effect allow subscribers to get unlimited access to the bandwidth they paid for.
Needless to say service providers are grappling with how to deal with these power subscribers. The solution is that they need to look beyond bandwidth as a way to structure how they group and price services to their subscribers. Tiered pricing that is based not only on bandwidth but also peer count, for example, would allow for a more functional pricing structure for the service provider. In other words, a subscriber who regularly communicates with 100 peers exhibits behavior that is much more like a business than a consumer and so pricing could reflect that. In this manner providers can move to being profitable on this subscribers’ service.
Here the core functionality of rapid problem identification (RPI) plays out. Xangati RPI technology creates interactivity profiles for every subscriber. We track the high/low marks for the peer communities and the applications they use on the Internet. This visibility allows service providers not only to identify the power users, but to understand their overall behaviors.
A well-known maxim is that you have to identify a problem to fix it. With Xangati technology, service providers have the ability to really “see” these types of problems first hand. As we develop deeper traction in the service provider market, I believe the kinds of problems that worry service provider CSOs today will one day be distant memories.
Jagan Jagannathan is a seasoned technologist with over twenty-five years of research and development experience in the fields of network computing, parallel systems, computer security and very high-level programming tools. Currently, Jagan is founder and CTO at Xangati and has applied techniques from intrusion detection and distributed computing to the field of network management resulting in Xangati’s unique rapid problem identification technology.
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Fixed Service Strategies for Mobile Network Operators, brought to you by Comverse (News - Alert).
Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Fixed Service Strategies for Mobile Network Operators, brought to you by Comverse (News - Alert). » More IPTV Feature Articles
