The Beacon
April 2020
President and Chief Executive Officer, Calix
This unprecedented health crisis is reinforcing the critical role that each of you play in everyone’s daily lives. You have demonstrated that your services are essential for communities to keep functioning. We thank you for all of your efforts to keep them connected, and want to let you know that we are here to support you.
The broadband experiences you provide are being challenged by this perfect storm of subscriber needs shifting to the home.
We are here to help you and your communities through this pandemic. In this edition of the Beacon you will see the latest ways in which we can help your customer support, marketing, and network operations teams meet their goals while keeping them and the members of your community safe.
We know your time is valuable. With this in mind we launched a COVID-19 resource page to consolidate a wide range of information to help you navigate through this crisis. Here you can access the latest industry news, updates from the FCC, the on-demand webinars, and best practices, as well as our experts during live “office hours.” You will also see a section called Community Champions where we are sharing your stories of “going the extra mile” to support the growing needs of your communities.
As I said in our last bulletin, we are expediting our inventory with air shipments to meet your requirements at no cost to you. We are continuing to work in our virtual environment to bring you the innovations that will help you continue to transform your business, and we are going on site when you need us to be there. Together, we will enable your subscribers, your communities, and the economy to keep moving forward… so that we may quickly get on our feet once this pandemic has passed.
It feels like everything around us is changing at the speed of light. In the span of a week, statewide stay-home orders in the U.S. grew from 9 to 30 states. Now close to 300 million people in at least 38 states are being urged to stay home while trying to find a new sense of normal.
This is why our Calix Customer Success team has been hosting Circles of Success, Webinars, and daily virtual office hours. These sessions make sure that you have quick and easy access to subject matter experts as well as an opportunity to engage and share ideas with your peers. You can access the latest sessions on the Calix COVID-19 Resources page.
I want to thank you all for your tireless efforts to keep your subscribers connected. Many of you have joined our success sessions to share the innovative ways you are adapting quickly during these exceptional times. Here are some of the key takeaways:
New and emergency installs
Many of you are seeing a spike in new service requests and installations. While a few have made the difficult decision to completely stop new installs and redefine what constitutes an emergency install, most are striking a balance to ensure both their employees and subscribers stay safe:
Your Recommended Action Plan
Maximizing remote troubleshooting
There has been an influx in inbound calls, both for reporting troubles and general inquiries since most have closed walk-in customer service offices. However, many indicated that subscribers have been extremely understanding and are willing to perform basic troubleshooting themselves when necessary. This both amplifies the role of the CSR and other support personnel and requires new practices.
While many of these practices rose out of sheer necessity, expect that many will become long-term best practices.
Your Recommended Action Plan
Customer Success Office Hours: Calix Support Cloud Q&A
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
10:00 AM ET / 7:00 AM PT
Don’t forget to bookmark the Calix COVID-19 Resources page to stay current on all resources available to you from Calix to help support your subscribers and keep them and your employees safe. On behalf of Calix, thank you for everything you do to help improve the lives of your subscribers.
Valley TeleCom Group (VTC), a cooperative serving over 20 communities in Arizona and New Mexico with high-speed Internet and voice services, has taken a proactive approach to managing their subscribers. Their upgrade to Calix Support Cloud (CSC) Experience Management Edition and partnership with Customer Success Services provided the tools and the best practices they needed to deliver the broadband experience their subscribers deserved. By fully adopting CSC across their support team, VTC was prepared to provide remote troubleshooting for their growing subscriber base during the COVID-19 crisis.
In less than a month, VTC realized:
Your Recommended Action Plan
Partner with Calix to keep your competitive edge.
Broadband access and reliability has never been more central to your subscribers’ daily lives. At the same time, we’re all facing new and unexpected challenges. That’s why we have designed our virtual summit to share lessons learned about providing best-in-class services during these difficult times.
Those of you who attended ConneXions 2019 may remember a key message from our opening session—our mission is to help our customers close the digital divide. As Carl mentioned, the COVID-19 health crisis is reinforcing the critical role that each of you play in your communities and in your subscribers’ daily lives. Schools are closing and sending students home, businesses are asking their employees to work from home, and families are sheltering in their homes. In many ways this crisis is creating a “perfect storm” for communications service providers. And we want to do everything we can to help!
Many of our customers have already taken the first step—deploying a fiber network that can deliver a symmetrical gigabit service to any subscriber. Many are accelerating plans. This is an important first step as these networks are uniquely capable of scaling to meet the exploding demand we are seeing today. Marketing teams are also playing an important role in addressing the challenges that the new “at home” reality creates for your subscribers
In our latest webinar we asked participants: How are you helping your subscribers embrace their new “at home” reality?
Your Recommended Action Plan
To tap into more best practices, I encourage you to join our Office Hours.
Customer Success Office Hours: Calix Marketing Cloud Q&A
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
10:30 AM ET / 7:30 AM PT
Your subscribers have new needs and you can help by understanding these needs and tailoring programs, offerings, and communications for each of your subscribers. Next week we will issue our next Revenue EDGE Beacon, which is tailored to meet the needs of marketing and business leaders. We will dive deeper on best practices and share insights from our customer who are effectively engaging their communities and helping them manage their way through this crisis. If you don’t currently subscribe to the Revenue EDGE edition, you can opt-in below.
Supporting the needs of Marketing and Business Leaders
The Revenue EDGE Beacon dives deeper into best practices and share insights from our customer who are effectively engaging their communities and understanding the data to build great experiences so that we can retain, grow, and attract new subscribers.
If you don’t currently subscribe to the Revenue EDGE edition, you can opt-in below.
Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Calix
We are all dealing with a good deal of uncertainty today. You are feeling it in your businesses, as you work to navigate through it. In addition, we are all wondering what the world will look like after we get to the other side of the curve. In the middle of this, two things have become clear. It’s absolutely critical to keep your teams safe and subscribers are relying on you and your network more than ever.
These two critical items can seem contradictory in today’s environment. Gone are the days where it is as simple as rolling a truck to solve a problem. However, we have tools to help you troubleshoot remotely, keeping your network and technicians healthy. Whether you are provisioning a service to a new subscriber or diagnosing an existing service, you have visibility to and through the ONT with the AXOS Diagnostic Toolbox. For example, its local and remote packet capture capability enables you to look at the traffic on a given VLAN to a specific port on the ONT. This allows you to ensure that service is getting to the home and through the ONT. The AXOS Diagnostic Toolbox is included on the Intelligent Access EDGE systems: the E9-2 Intelligent Edge System, E7-2 Intelligent Modular System, and E3-2 Intelligent PON Node.
Your Recommended Action Plan
To learn more about the AXOS Diagnostics Toolbox and how it can reduce your truck rolls, you can attend one of these events:
You can also access these additional resources:
We know that each of you are working tirelessly to keep your subscribers connected. Calix Services wants to thank you, and let you know that we have your back to help you address the challenges you’re encountering due to increased broadband usage and concerns for employee and subscriber safety. We want to increase your visibility into network impacting issues and allow your teams to solve problems faster, with fewer truck rolls, through tools that analyze troubles remotely.
IMU Fiber is a terrific example of how to address these challenges. With increasing numbers of subscribers working from home, their daytime usage has more than doubled, climbing to 65 percent of network capacity. Fortunately, its AXOS enabled FTTH network is more than capable of handling the spike in demand.
With increasing traffic levels and more subscribers working from home, many of you are looking for guidance on whether your network has the capacity to handle the additional broadband traffic. You may also be seeking advice on what potential bottlenecks you may encounter as you increase the bandwidth to subscribers.
Assisting your teams with three new Calix Services
Your Recommended Action Plan
To find out more about the Network Capacity Assessment Service and the new bundle with the Remote Monitoring Service, click the links below.
Ordering is FAST and EASY with the My Calix Store
The My Calix Store is a fully self-service e-commerce experience, allowing you to quickly and conveniently order Calix solutions or obtain up-to-the-minute order status and shipping information. No need to email and wait for a reply. My Calix Store is the fastest way to get the information you need when you need it, 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. If online ordering doesn't fit with your company’s processes, you can also export quotes as PDFs directly from the tool. This provides your purchasing department with the information they need to issue a purchase order (PO) which can be emailed along with a copy of the quote to om@calix.com.
To learn more about the My Calix Store, you can access these quick “How-to videos.” In addition, we host daily Office Hours for those wanting more assistance and training. If you are interested in setting up an account in the My Calix Store, please reach out to your sales representative and they will be happy to assist you.
Your Recommended Action Plan
My Calix Store Office Hours
Monday through Friday, 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
Since my last update in March, there have been no significant changes in our supply strategy. Our Product Operations team remains committed, actively engaging with our manufacturing and supply partners to mitigate risks and remove constraints to meet your demand.
We continue to identify and qualify alternate component sources and are expediting via air freight wherever possible at no cost to you. We are committed to working with you on your urgent needs and requirements. We also encourage you to utilize the tools available for placing your orders in advance as we continue to experience longer than normal lead times with our supply base.
Early Adoption*
**Note: Mature Release means the latest production software is current and recommended for use.
*Note: This software is at Early Adoption status with select customers conducting field tests and providing feedback. This program requires Calix pre-approval. If you are interesting in joining an Early Adopter group for a specific software release, please go to the Software Center (below), select the software in question and click the "Request Software" link.
