The Beacon
April 2019
In our efforts to develop deeper partnerships and contribute to your ongoing success as Calix customers, we are always learning. In the spirit of finding ways to continually improve how we learn from the industry, share our learning with you, and how you can share this learning with your subscribers, you will find this April edition of the Beacon full of examples.
A few highlights:
As we gear up for our next quarterly release in May, you will see more examples of how we continue to deliver offerings and learnings to help you grow your business and to help your subscribers take full advantage of the innovative services you provide.
AVP, Product Marketing Subscriber Experience,
Calix
It’s no surprise that many service providers have chosen to take advantage of both the solutions Calix Cloud has to offer. While Calix Support Cloud was engineered for customer care operations and Calix Marketing Cloud for marketing organizations, it is always fascinating to see how service providers are finding ways to capitalize on the synergies between the deep visibility and aggregate intelligence they have to offer.
One specific example is SCTelcom. Carla Shearer, CEO/General Manager of the Kansas-based broadband provider, explains during a recent Subscriber Experience Spotlight series webinar that one of their early realizations about delivering the best possible subscriber experience was that it meant empowering every person in the organization that interacts with subscribers. But it was costly and difficult to find and retain the right talent with the expertise and skill set to leverage the data that would empower them, which did not align with their operational goals.
After investing in Calix Cloud, they quickly identified all subscribers with poor service experience using Calix Marketing Cloud and ran a campaign targeting streamers and gamers with a tailored message and offer. In addition to their usual direct mail and email marketing, they included outbound calling with their Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).
These CSRs were already taking advantage of the visibility and intelligence Calix Support Cloud had to offer. Features like Self Check and advanced troubleshooting were allowing for meaningful conversations with subscribers to resolve issues faster. According to Carla, they turned on Self Heal network wide after hearing about it at ConneXions. For those new to Self Heal, it is the ability to proactively find and fix Wi-Fi issues.
This collaboration between the customer care and marketing teams amplified the power of investing in both the Calix Cloud solutions. CSRs were now looking closely at what was compromising the experience of the subscribers on the marketing list before calling them to offer the right service to meet their needs.
The results of this strategy speaks for itself:
For more, check out the replay of webinar with SCTelcom. If you are a Calix Support Cloud customer, to take a look at how Calix Marketing Cloud can supplement your efforts to deliver the best possible subscriber experience. And don’t be shy about sharing your experience with your marketing colleagues and leadership!
Product Marketing Director
New Markets/Premises, Calix
As subscribers experiment with the connected home or begin to transition into the smart home, the learning curve can be steep. It may be tempting to skip some steps and jump straight into services your subscribers may not understand or be ready for.
You have a compelling opportunity to position yourself as the provider of choice to deliver the solutions for the smart home of the future. And the best place to start is by educating your subscribers.
Reason #1: Educating your subscribers allows you to elevate and differentiate your brand.
Explain the benefits of complicated technology to your subscribers in a simple, meaningful way to alleviate their concerns. It also builds a relationship based on trust, resulting in them viewing your relationship in a new light and increasing their loyalty to your brand.
Reason #2: Educated subscribers drive demand.
Become the trusted advisor. Subscribers are more likely to contact someone they trust when they are looking at new solutions to make their lives easier. We’ve all heard of the “nephew of my brother-in-law who helps with my IT stuff.” But your relationship with subscribers gives you a great opportunity to serve as that trusted advisor who recommends the latest smart home solutions that blend seamlessly with their network without making things complicated.
Reason #3: Education creates advocates.
Subscribers who trust you, and embrace new solutions you provide, are also more likely to recommend you to others. Word of mouth advertising is invaluable. When subscribers are your advocates, they will speak up on your behalf and share how their experience has improved by using your solutions.
Reason #4: Educated responses remove concerns.
When service providers take the time to anticipate subscriber questions and ensure that answers are readily available for both subscribers and staff, it results in an atmosphere of stability and trust.
Reason #5: Educating your customers reduces support calls.
Providing your subscribers with a basic understanding of how the Internet and Wi-Fi works can also result in reduced support calls. With continuing education, a helpful app, and a little bit of understanding, your subscribers will feel more confident taking control of their home network.
So where do you start?
The opportunity is now, and Calix is here to help. We continue to add new resources for educating and marketing to your subscribers to our library of resources here. Check out our new Digital Dilemmas social media campaign assets.
Product Marketing Director
New Markets/Premises, Calix
Back in early February, we announced the market’s first and fully operational CAF Performance Testing solution. The response has been extremely positive, and service providers have jumped on the opportunity to begin their early pre-testing. This is providing us with an opportunity to share what we are learning from you, and address some of your questions.
Common Questions:
The Calix CAF Performance Testing solution, with the EXOS-powered GigaSpire and Calix Support Cloud service complies with the FCC required testing. The solution also utilizes built-in intelligence and tools to continuously improve the subscriber experience and build a foundation to deliver revenue generating services in the future. We encourage service providers to try this embedded solution first, before spending significant resources looking at alternatives.
Enhancements Coming in May!
To stay current with our quarterly release cycle, click below for regular access to the latest insights and updates to our CAF Performance Testing solution.
Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Calix
We have made significant advancements in our AXOS portfolio and you all are taking notice. Q1 2019 was our largest AXOS quarter ever. We didn’t just exceed previous quarters; we blew right past them. I’m not excited about this for the reason you think, I’m excited because that means we share a common vision. A vision where software simplifies the operations and architecture of networks and helps ensure your businesses can accelerate to meet the demands of your subscribers.
Speaking of acceleration, were you aware that the AXOS E-Series portfolio now has NG-PON2, XGS-PON, 10G EPON, GPON, Active Ethernet, and Gfast all available and shipping? With this breadth of technologies across the E-Series portfolio, along with AXOS platform hardware independence and common service models, you can easily deploy the services you subscribers want while simplifying your operations. Whatever the technology or the system, provisioning a service is the same.
In addition, with all the new applications available to your subscribers, I’ve recently heard some of you say that you’ve exceeded your ring capacity on your access network. The AXOS E7-2 10GE-12 Aggregation line card, which has been deployed in networks since 2018, enables you to bring 10G or 40G uplinks to your access network and aggregate your downstream systems using 10G or multiple 10G links. You may not be ready to upgrade that GPON to 10G PON yet, because your subscribers aren’t exceeding their GPON connections. However, if you put all their traffic together, they may already be exceeding your existing aggregation solution. Adding an E7-2 10GE-12 aggregation line card could be a very simple solution to improving your subscribers’ experience.
So what's next?
With all the new applications accelerating the need for bandwidth, standards groups such as ITU, FSAN, BBF, and IEEE are working on several new technologies to help you keep up with the demands on your network. Have you heard of G.hsp? Probably not. Just know that it has a few flavors and could get you symmetric bandwidth as high as 800G sometime in the future.
Whatever technologies the standards groups ultimately decide on for the next big thing, it’s important to remember that AXOS hardware independence and common service models will ensure you can easily integrate them into your network. If you’d like to learn more about some of the potential new technologies and figure out which ones might be of most interest to you, join me in my upcoming webinar with Broadband World News titled 5G, WiFi6, 10G, 50G PON: The Alphabet Soup Continues.
Did you know that 78 percent of IoT and Smart Home experts agree that the real monetization of connected devices will lie in the “creation, deployment, and maintenance of value-added services”? This was confirmed in a recent study of the investments, skills, and security needs for the IoT and Smart Home space, conducted by Canonical. Interestingly, this same study discovered that providers are struggling to prepare their teams with the right skills to effectively manage the growing wave of smart devices connecting to today’s networks. Developing deeper skills around analytics and security tools were two of several areas highlighted for existing employees and for recruiting new talent.
Does your team have the foundational skills to help you take advantage of these opportunities? Are they trained to:
Calix Education Services has developed both self-paced and instructor-led courses to help you accelerate your team’s readiness to deploy value added services, with curricula focused on:
Our Education Subscription Program is a great way to get started. For one low annual fee, a learner gets unlimited access to all eLearning and remote instructor-led courses in the Calix Academy. This program provides end-to-end education on the latest technologies, premises, cloud, and access platforms. As new and updated courses come out, subscribers are automatically notified.
We covered all of this in detail during our webinar “Foundational Education Courses to Monetize the Smart Home." Click the link below to view the webinar replay. You can also set up a free consultation on Education Services training and certification options by clicking below.
The time has come when you can define a new reality for your subscribers. Your subscribers are asking for new services, and now you can exceed their expectations. Calix is excited to partner with you on how to make new innovations a reality for all of your subscribers. To accelerate our partnership, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Regional Summit series.
During the summit, we will share how our customers have:
It’s an exciting time for our industry, with advances in optical networking like NG-PON2 and coherent optics, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G wireless technologies, plus a steady move toward automating service creation leveraging open standard APIs.
New revenue opportunities are on the way in the form of remote medicine, industrial automation, and augmented reality, to name a few. But to deliver the low latency and high bandwidth that these applications require, the network architecture needs to change. We need to move the applications from the Cloud data center to a regional data center, and in some cases, right into the local market for network “edge computing.” Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), formerly Mobile Edge Computing, is not a new concept, but advances in software platforms and virtualization have made MEC a critical investment for many network operators.
The impact of MEC on the broadband access network will be profound. Almost by definition, edge compute occurs at the application level within a network. In the broadband networks we’ve been building since the dawn of DSL, we’ve backhauled layer 2 connections – first ATM and now Ethernet – deep into the regional network to a centralized BNG router. That’s where we terminate Layer 2 transport and begin to have visibility to the applications inside.
We can’t continue backhauling application-blind Layer 2 traffic any longer when we implement edge computing. Rather, we must distribute the IP edge out to the broadband serving offices and terminate layer 2 VLAN tunnels at that point. Then we can steer IP application flows to their targeted resources – be that the Internet, locally cached OTT video, or local edge compute-based services. In other words, the BNG needs to be closer to the subscriber than the MEC applications that we are pushing to the network edge.
Data center inspired edge computing is moving to the very farthest reaches of the service provider network. Service provider-owned premises systems, with an embedded software platform capable of running microservices, will quickly become the sought-after edge computing resource for a host of new applications. On-premises edge computing could extend the capabilities of low-cost IoT sensors by providing local, low latency compute resources that will greatly expand the market for facial recognition security, healthcare monitoring, and other industrial applications.
So, stay tuned. Software platforms, application layer intelligence, and edge computing are coming to the local broadband network and will revolutionize this already exciting industry.
What’s your perspective?
And of course, there’s plenty more to read and share on the Calix Perspectives page blogs. I look forward to hearing your perspective.
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Each month, we highlight the top 5 recent Calix Blog posts to make sure you don't miss out on the latest news and insights from Calix experts and industry guests.
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The Managed home and business Learning Path covers GigaFamily devices and the array of Support Cloud and Marketing Cloud capabilities.
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The Calix Traditional Platforms Learning Path prepares your team to implement, maintain, and troubleshoot our E7, E5 and E3 hardware and software products.
Ethernet Access Network Design and Best Practices
Serving an expansive area in both Southeast Montana and Northeast Wyoming, the Range Companies (Range) consist of four service providers with more than 18,000 voice and 12,000 broadband subscribers.
With a strategic goal of delivering a great experience to each subscriber, no matter where they may be located, Range turned to Calix Support Cloud to enable remote Wi-Fi troubleshooting and a more proactive approach to Wi-Fi service management with features like Self-Heal.
After working with the Calix Customer Success Services team, Range saw incredible results from its Calix Support Cloud implementation. In just one month, Range was able to reduce the number of Wi-Fi related support calls that required a truck roll from one out of every three calls, to one out of every six calls. That is a 42 percent reduction in only 30 days.
Range’s rural territory also makes those truck rolls quite expensive and that reduction resulted in $15,000 in savings in that 30-day period.
Hear more about the impact Calix Support Cloud, as well as Calix Marketing Cloud, is having on Range’s business as they strive to be the trusted technology partner to their subscribers in this video interview with CMO Jason Wille.
Role: Systems Support Specialist
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Years of Service: 2.5 years
Calix Expertise: Salesforce
School: Biola University
Favorite Movie: The Princess Bride
Favorite Vacation Spot: Moab Utah
Favorite Author: C.S. Lewis
Fun Fact: I have climbed Mount Fuji
Resource Page for AXOS Systems in My Calix
EXOS
Resource Page for EXOS/Smart Home and Business in My Calix
EXA and GigaFamily
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