HomePNA Blog

U-verse TV Gains While App Puts Support at Customers’ Fingertips

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher

There I was, all set to write an award winning post about AT&T’s free Troubleshoot & Resolve app, a new (and free) on-screen TV application that gives customers access to self-support information and tools for their U-verse TV service. And then, whamo, out of the blue AT&T announced 2nd quarter results of 202,000 new U-verse TV subscribers bringing the total to 3.4 million. Even better, with 75% of those subscribers having triple- or quad-play packages, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for U-verse customers is up 8.3% over last year.

Reaching for my trusty slide rule I quickly ran the numbers and found that, much to no ones’ surprise, the less money per customer that you spend on support the more profit you make - and apparently the more customers you have the more obvious it becomes. A quick look in my college Economics textbook confirmed my suspicions. More customers and higher ARPU combined with lower support costs equals higher profit. Eager to share my discovery, I phoned a friend at a major TelcoTV provider. He was less than impressed. Apparently they plan it that way.

AT&T has long been using HomePNA diagnostics. I’ve written in the past about them using the diagnostics capability to monitor the performance of customers’ home networks from their central office (you remember – all that talk about yucky stuff like TR-069). HomePNA’s diagnostic capabilities – the ability to obtain valuable performance “metrics” including user data throughput, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), and Packet Error Rate (PER) for every path in the network - provide the most robust information on in-home network performance and form a key part of user support tools (they log the data for every service call). And the HomePNA diagnostics come for free – they are a product of the managed network architecture.

So naturally the Troubleshoot & Resolve app uses HomePNA diagnostics and adds new network-based resources to proactively troubleshoot the home set-up, diagnosing and hopefully enabling the customer to fix any problem with the set-top boxes and other home equipment.

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.

Who'sYour Help Desk ??

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

After blogging and evangelizing about telcos becoming the home owner’s PC help desk, it was nice to see a telco saying the same thing - and that thing reported in the Wall Street Journal (or the WSJ if you're really cool). Read on .... “More telecoms are offering tech-support services that extend beyond the phone line to the PC or TV. People want the same level of IT support they get in the workplace,” said Dan Alcazar, Embarq's consumer-marketing officer. "When you're at home, you don't have access to these kinds of things," he said. "It became apparent that there was a business opportunity there."

The July 31 issue of the WSJ article "Computer Glitch? Consider Calling the Phone Company” puts some meat on the bones by comparing the costs of services from AT&T, Verizon, Embarq, CenturyTel, Windstream, and Frontier Communications to Best Buy’s Geek Squad (hint, they’re cheaper). Although most telcos only offer support to broadband customers, some, such as Frontier, offer it to anyone. As someone that has personally experienced the thrill of being lobed back and forth like a birdie in a badminton game between Dell’s and Microsoft’s customer “support” desks, I say woo-hoo.

Of course the cost for providing this support will need to be driven down. According to the WSJ, Best Buy charges $300 for a house call. The telcos … a half to a third of that. Knowing as we do how much telcos hate house calls (a.k.a. truck rolls), you can guess where this is going. We expect to see even more emphasis on remote diagnostics and management and an increased drive in the Broadband Forum (formerly the DSL Forum) to complete the work of adding home network remote diagnostics to their Broadband Home suite of recommendations. We believe HomePNA has best-in-class capabilities and that this development is a win-win for industry and consumers alike.

What is Known about G.hn?

So what exactly is known about G.hn? It’s known that the anticipated future worldwide standard for wired home networking will work over coax, powerline and phone wires. The group has targeted 1 Gbit/s data rates over coax which should translate into 500Mbit/s or higher user throughput (what you get after subtracting the overhead). But that isn’t the whole story so read on.

Fast isn’t enough, it also has to be reliable and predictable over the entire house. That’s easier to do over communication media like coax and phone wires, not so easy over powerline. A lot of design and analysis effort is going into making G.hn robust. The more robust it is, the less the headaches later. To make this happen you need the kind of input that only comes from experience; which is why we are so excited about the participation of so many leading home networking technology companies.

Beyond speed and reach, it’s a given that G.hn will provide features such as guaranteed QoS (sometimes called parameterized QoS) that are as good or better than those provided by the current crop of existing-wire home networking technologies. HomePNA 3.1, for example, has featured guaranteed QoS since the HomePNA 3.0 spec was released in 2003 (both the HomePNA 3.0 and 3.1 are ITU standard G.9954. Other home networking technologies claim to support guaranteed QoS but since they are not all open standards it’s hard to verify this.

Other features such as hooks for remote management and diagnostics (see April 14 Blog “Got TR-069”) play a central role in service provider deployment and support plans so the ability to verify network performance – both during installation and remotely from the central office - are also a given.