Bringing Intelligence to the Cable Plant

Written by: Todd Gingrass, Director of Cable and Media Solutions 

As cable operators, for years we have tried to be proactive about plant maintenance to keep services working at optimal levels and our subscribers happy. However, over the years our perception of proactive plant maintenance has mutated. A decade ago, performing 100% plant sweep and leakage detection was the go-to method for preventing outages and impairments. While that thought process was not incorrect, we all know the reality of it. Not enough time, people and resources. Staying on top of the day-to-day problems had been enough to keep us reactive in our maintenance process, making a full proactive sweep a pipe dream.

We know that a marginally well maintained plant will typically only have issues in about 50% of the actual sweep coverage. What if we could get that 50% of time back?  How would that change the bottom line as an operator? 


Getting out from behind

So how do we break that cycle of always being behind? It is easy to say we are too busy to get out and be proactive, but the reality is much more difficult. 

• What if we could be proactive and not have to physically “get out there”? 
• What if we could harness available data from the plant and mix that with decades of good old cable know-how to identify portions of the plant that need the most help? 
• What if that could help me prioritize my day so when time is spent, it produces the most valuable results?

The answer, it’s all possible today!

Cable modems have been able to tell us a lot about plant performance for quite some time. As an industry, we have been slow to realize and take advantage of these technological advancements. While it is by no means “simple” to make all of this work, it is worth it on the backside.  

The new generation of modern intelligence

During the later stages of DOCSIS 3, modems on the market were able to capture the entire forward bandwidth—not just the original “sliding window” of 40 or 80 MHz, but the entire spectrum from around 50 MHz to 1 GHz. If this “capture” sounds familiar, it should. It’s basically a visualization of the frequency response of the forward bandwidth, otherwise known as… you guessed it, a basic sweep response.

 

With the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard out and vendors now going through certification, this and many other maintenance tools have been built into both CMTS and cable modems. Imagine being able to see the sweep response of your entire plant from a computer without ever leaving the office. Add on top of that, the fact that before we would typically sweep amp to amp, but now we are basically sweeping modem to modem. You can now see down to the tap where an impairment might present itself.

Actionable intelligence  

The prior example is only one of the potential tools that is or soon will be available to us as operators. Now imagine automating those steps so that information can be acted upon immediately, rather than having to spend hours analyzing and prioritize large amounts of data. We could really start to affect the days of our plant staff, allowing them to increase their productivity and get back to being preventative. This modification of how we view and handle plant maintenance will have a great impact on our real goals: 

As an operator, CCI understands how hard it is to stay ahead and offer the great services that we promise our subscribers. That’s why we have taken our 60+ years of industry experience and changed the game by building these types of tools. We use them ourselves and have seen first-hand how taking a truly proactive approach positively impacts our business.  

If you’re interested in discussing Managed Services for your network, reach out to CCI or follow us on social media.

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