Automation

Best Practices for Fiber Service Operations in Open Access Times

By Sonya Goodanetz on June, 30 2020

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Sonya Goodanetz

Fiber service delivery via a wholesale open-access approach will soon be the norm in Europe as a decreasing number of operators want to take on the massive investment to build their own fiber infrastructure. Open access, however, presents unique operational challenges in managing fiber services to the wholesaler, retail ISP, and end-customer, spanning ordering, provisioning, activation, and assurance. Let’s explore some of the fiber operator challenges, their business impacts, and what steps wholesalers and retailers can take in 2020.

Fiber Operator Challenge

Business Impact

Best Practice

Fiber activation ordering processes for retail ISPs are cumbersome and error-prone.

Decreased customer satisfaction and lost revenue to incumbent wholesale operators.

Expose a portal or API to retail ISPs for provisioning and activating services.

Pressure from retail ISPs to improve fault response times.

Customer satisfaction and NPS is negatively impacted.

As reported in the Incognito and Light Reading fiber survey, 47% of operators said they would benefit from wholesale access to network insights to help triage subscriber service quality issues faster and determine network availability. End-to-end visibility is key!

An ambitious fiber rollout, high activation volumes, and frequent service changes is bringing my manual provisioning process to its knees.

Not only is operational efficiency and costs a factor, but service velocity is also impacted. Scaling is not achievable.

Automation of the fulfillment process – from the service layer down to fiber EMS or direct OLT activation.

Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many subscribers are now working and spending more time at home.

Digital broadband services being delivered to the home is being pushed to the limit and quality of experience is being affected.

Sufficient fiber capacity is just a single piece of the puzzle. Having a robust approach to ensuring service quality is key (ex. harnessing the power of device diagnostics, speed tests, remote configuration)

Provisioning process for retail ISPs is quite lengthy.

Delayed order to cash interval for both the wholesale operator and retail ISP.

As reported in the Incognito and Light Reading fiber survey, 52% of operators indicated they would benefit from access to a portal with integration to their wholesales to streamline service ordering and provisioning processes.

Fulfilling orders and activation requests to growing retail ISP subscriber base on a national fiber network.

How do you segment multiple network operators and protect subscriber data all while managing operational costs and resources?

Implement a centralized provisioning platform that supports multi-tenancy.

B2B/B2B2C cloud services – need to be highly-available and have the ability to support on-demand service changes to connectivity.

Business and enterprise services also rely on wholesale fiber. Can SLAs be met?

Automate the provisioning and upgrading of services from a central platform, while also having the ability to address different types of fiber services such as mobile backhaul.

 

Ready to drive efficiency and automation for your fiber wholesale operations?  If so, let’s connect and put Incognito’s productized best practices for fiber service orchestration into action.

CONTACT INCOGNITO  

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