OpEx Reduction Strategies for Today's xDSL World
Providing telephony service in the old POTs world, was a relatively straight forward and well understood business. Telephones were simple and reliable devices. Customer service faults were mainly attributable to cable pair faults and the occasional POTs switch fault. Over decades, Telco's evolved very effective customer fault management processes, supported by night routining of copper lines to proactively address line problems.
In today's IP world, cable pair faults are still an issue but the overall problem set is far more complex. Consumers now expect high-speed data connections to web servers, reliable Voice over IP communications and quality video entertainment services and all for very little money.
When it all stops working, consumers turn to their xDSL service provider to fix the problem. Unfortunately analysing the problems can be very complex and the cause can often lie in the customer's own equipment or even in other service provider's networks, but the CSP is left to sort out the mess. There is no way that the CSP can escape this responsibility. Many have tried, but the customers have no one else to turn to.
The harder the service provider tries to shirk this responsibility, the greater the cost of failure. One need only look at the appalling mess some of today's 'low cost' CSPs have managed to get themselves into: - unhappy customers voting with their feet, inadequate numbers of employees trying to knife and fork through festering problems and the cost of fighting customers over disputed bills. Case study
In a case study we carried out for one of our customers, we found that a technician had been dispatched to the exchange on eight occasions to test the DSLAM card for a fault over a six month period. On each occasion the result was "no fault found" but the customer kept on experiencing difficulties establishing a xDSL connection. A proper analysis of the problem showed that the problem was due to a defective DSL modem.
There is however a very simple way to control and minimise the OpEx associated with service provision and that is to implement an effective fault management process.
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