Home Network Management – an Activity Enabled by a Platform

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Six or seven years ago who would have thought that service providers would not only consider home networks to be part of their network but would want to manage them? Well they sure do now. According to an article in Billing and OSS World magazine last week, the home network enables service providers to partake in a host of other applications that span from utilities to health care. And lest we forget that pesky need to reduce service costs and especially minimize the number of service calls. This isn’t exactly news but neither is the requirement for remote monitoring and management – essential to providing a stable home network for these applications.

So today, instead of evangelists (like me) spinning the story, we have technologists and product managers at leading service providers like Verizon (who use MOCA for home networking) and TELUS (who use HomePNA) describing their plans for the home network.

By coincidence, I was discussing the very same topic last week with a respected engineer at another equally well known leading telco that uses HomePNA for its’ triple play IPTV service. He told me that, from their operations center, he had diagnosed a home networking problem in his boss’s house down to a loose coax connector on one of the set-top boxes. Turns out the boss had previously detached the connector while he was working on his entertainment center. Connector tightened; problem solved. The fix was verified by a quick to the operations center and, most importantly, no service call was required.

Well one reason (as my friend the engineer will tell you) that this particular service provider choose HomePNA was the attention to integrated remote diagnostics and management capabilities (and we at HomePNA believe that HomePNA 3.1 has best in class capabilities). And one reason for this blog is to talk about how this stuff is real and a lot of it is integrated into the residential gateways, set-top boxes and other equipment being installed being in customers’ homes today.

Comments

[Network Management Tools]

The post contains the information on how network management has matched up with home management and their efficiency in managing the network in the house.

[homes for sale philippines]

I am with you Network mgnt tools, agreed.

Deirdre G

[Slow PC]

Agreed upon the things have been discussed. I am happy to hear a line that is "no service call was required." Also better solution for all home networks, the efficiency providers have shown is welcoming.