The Beacon
August 2018
Shortening copper loops has been an ongoing process for over a decade as service providers sought to deliver higher bandwidth services over existing infrastructure. This transition has created a very decentralized network architecture for many service providers. Many now have active electronics several miles from central offices. In addition, all these remote systems must be connected to the upstream network in the central offices, headends, and data centers.
The access network has now become a service provider’s biggest challenge. Subscribers expect the network to always be available, yet it is so spread out that service providers find it difficult to install, maintain, and upgrade the systems required to provide the always-on experience. The access network needs to change to keep up with subscriber demands and enable service providers to continue to grow.
Change is often thought to be difficult, but in fact it’s easier than you think. To be successful, it’s not a rip and replace activity, it’s a logical evolution that enables the network to be upgraded without impacting, and often improving existing services.
The most logical point in a network to start this transformation is where existing OLTs are aggregated together. Why? First, these are the locations where adding more bandwidth will make a big impact on the quality of service delivered to subscribers over existing access technologies. Second, they are points in the network where a service provider can reduce the amount of fiber and upstream router ports required and in turn lower the cost of network upgrades.
This is where the newest addition to the AXOS E7-2 line card portfolio comes in, the AXOS E7-2 10G Aggregation line card (E7-2 10GE-12). The line card allows service providers to conserve fiber and reduces the need to go through the process of burying more. In addition, this line card enables service providers to aggregate many smaller central offices for the cost of upgrading a single larger router to do the same task.
Most importantly, the E7-2 aggregation line card is powered by AXOS. This means that not only does the card provide significant capital cost savings, but it can kick-off the AXOS journey. What easier place to begin the AXOS journey than in a network location where provisioning is simpler and the functions of aggregation and OLTs can be consolidated onto a common platform. By selecting AXOS for network transformation, service providers can redefine the access network and take advantage of its unique capabilities such as hardware independence, services abstraction, modular architecture, stateful operation, and SDN interfaces.
If you’d like to learn more about how the AXOS E7-2 Aggregation line card can help you begin your AXOS journey, listen to the recent AXOS Tech Talk #4 here.
Join Calix on the third Wednesday of every month for our AXOS Tech Talk Series. Each Tech Talk webinar will go into topics to help you further understand AXOS and how it can benefit your business. The sessions will enable you to ask questions about capabilities within AXOS of Calix experts as well as service providers deploying AXOS. You can register below for notification of future webinars topics as they are announced.
Senior Manager, Conference and Events, Calix
On Tuesday, October 30, we will welcome acclaimed astronaut, NFL player, scientist, TV personality and author, Leland Melvin, to our general session stage at Calix ConneXions 2018 as a featured keynote speaker.
“Houston, we have a problem.” Leland Melvin was 25 feet under water in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a 6-million-gallon pool, training to perform spacewalks as a NASA astronaut when he called the test director and asked him to turn the volume up in his headset. He never heard a reply and was immediately hoisted out of the pool to learn that he was deaf. Emergency surgery resulting in only partial recovery to his hearing led him to being medically disqualified to fly in space by NASA flight surgeons. This is just one of the many career ending challenges Leland has overcome in his life. Before becoming an astronaut, Leland was drafted by the Detroit Lions in the 1986 College Draft to play professional football, but a hamstring injury thwarted his NFL career with Detroit and then later with the Dallas Cowboys.
Hear his fascinating story of perseverance and how he ultimately traveled off-planet twice on Space Shuttle Atlantis to help build the International Space Station. Leland is the only person drafted into the National Football League to have flown in space. The Pro Football Hall of Fame honored his athletic and academic accomplishments by placing his Detroit Lions jersey under glass in Canton, Ohio. Through these professional experiences working on high stakes teams he developed a deep and nuanced understanding of effective team dynamics.
Mr. Melvin will be signing copies of his recently released memoir, Chasing Space: An Astronaut's Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances. In Chasing Space, Leland shares his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, and examine the intersecting roles of community, perseverance and grace that align to create the opportunities for success.
We also just recently released a listing of the planned breakout sessions. Be sure to download the PDF and check out our web page at www.calix.com/connexions for more announcements leading up to the conference. We can’t wait to see you in October.
Calix ConneXions is where pioneers and thought leaders come to debate, collaborate and learn about the latest innovations that winning service providers are using to evolve their business models. At ConneXions we celebrate our customers’ successes, announce new products and services, and build community. But more than that, with new and ongoing partnerships and ecosystems, this shared experience will enable you to take your business to the next level.
Service providers like Allo Communications, All West Communications, CL Tel, Hiawatha Broadband Communications (HBC), and Mosaic Telecom are among the many Calix customers who quickly realized the benefits of transitioning from Consumer Connect Plus (CC+) to Calix Support Cloud (CSC).
If you are still on the fence and wondering why your peers adopted the next generation tool, here are a few reasons directly from them.
Thinking beyond device management
It takes much more than network administration to ensure subscribers are getting the best possible service. In addition to providing the device-centric visibility and control needed to manage and maintain both Calix and non-Calix devices, CSC extends access to subscriber behavior analytics.
By aggregating and correlating network device data, application traffic, and subscriber billing information, CSC provides powerful insights into subscriber experience.
With the CC+ implementation already capturing device data, you have a great head start. And if you happen to have Flow Analyze Plus as well, consider yourself on a fast and easier path to getting a comprehensive view of CSC.
Empowering the entire customer care organization
While CC+ caters to more technical users like Tier 2 customer service representatives (CSRs) and network operations teams, CSC is designed to deliver visibility and intelligence to all users across the customer care organization.
With real-time network snapshots and automation, features like SmartCheck and the recommendation engine put everything Tier 1 CSRs need to triage subscriber issues at their fingertips. For example, what would take at least five clicks and a lot of manual analysis to troubleshoot Wi-Fi with CC+, can be done in two clicks in CSC.
And features like Call Avoidance Reports allow contact center managers to focus on improving key call center metrics, while discovering upgrade opportunities.
Of course, Tier 2 specialists can also remediate complex issues faster with drilldowns into advanced diagnostics and simplified workflows, and network operations can continue to centrally manage service activations and bulk operations. Read how Heidi Tietz at Mosaic Telecom is changing her approach to supporting their subscribers.
Investing in the power of cloud and analytics
With an abundance of data trapped in different systems and departments, CSC is purpose-built for the carrier market to tap into the power of analytics, automation, and machine learning.
Tailored for support organizations, CSC is well on its way to enabling autonomous networks. Self-Heal, a feature designed to reduce manual intervention, automatically optimizes Wi-Fi performance, making proactively delivering world class subscriber experience - a reality.
So, what exactly are CSC users doing with this unprecedented access to subscriber analytics and automation? Iowa-based CL Tel, a full-service telecommunications and broadband service provider, is improving call resolution time by 25 percent and reducing trouble tickets by 36 percent.
You too can lower average talk times, improve first-call resolution, reduce
truck rolls, and proactively prevent trouble calls with Calix Support Cloud.
You’ve probably noticed, when walking through your neighborhood, that your smart phone has visibility of multiple Wi-Fi networks. This is because modern residential service delivery platforms are becoming more powerful than ever. The Calix GigaCenter, for example, can broadcast a signal that covers several thousand square feet.
You cannot usually access these other networks, however, because they are almost always locked. Why is access restricted? Largely, it is because the owner of that home network is concerned about:
What if there was a way for multiple subscribers to get Wi-Fi connectivity from shared residential platforms in a way that addresses these concerns?
What is Community Wi-Fi?
Community Wi-Fi networks allow unused Wi-Fi capacity to be leveraged to offer access to other subscribers; even if they are not the owner of the residential platform being accessed.
This excess capacity can also be offered to retail establishments, to subscribers of roaming-partner companies, or to generate additional revenue by offering paid access to non-subscribers.
The residential subscribers accessing the network from inside their homes always have prioritized access to the Wi-Fi network resources. The residential Wi-Fi infrastructure is configured in a way that allows for a secure and independent access channel to retain service quality, safety, and privacy for both residential and visitor customers. Roaming users are only allowed to use the Wi-Fi network capacity that is not currently used by the subscriber at home.
In a Community Wi-Fi set-up, the residential platform in the home broadcasts two SSIDs: a private one for the home owner/subscriber (shown in blue) and a community network (shown in red) for on-the-go subscribers passing through the neighborhood (as shown in the figure below).
Community Wi-Fi = Ubiquitous Wi-Fi
The next time you’re walking through your neighborhood, imagine having ubiquitous Wi-Fi connectivity, by connecting to your neighbors’ home networks. Instead of all Wi-Fi networks being locked, subscribers using the same service provider could connect seamlessly. This concept is a reality and it is called ‘Community Wi-Fi’.
The newest software for the GigaCenter — Release 12.2.8.1, which was recently made available on the Calix Software Center — allows subscribers to share Wi-Fi data, with no impact on the performance of the home network, while maintaining their privacy. And, since the majority of North American households either do not have bandwidth restrictions or their limits are rarely reached, extra capacity can be shared with other users.
Network transformation describes a lot of the activities that service providers take on to move their companies forward. Network transformation projects do cover a wide range of initiatives that innovative service providers embrace, but in reality, these projects should not just to improve the status quo, but rather help them improve their value to their subscribers.
The projects that Calix Professional Services teams perform with our customers help address technical challenges, but ultimately, they help lower risk, improve performance for subscribers, and position a company to expand its business opportunities. The projects deliver outcomes like simplifying processes used in managing the network and delivering services, modernizing infrastructure to improve efficiencies, increasing automation and programmability, and lowering costs.
In talking with Professional Services team lead, Jason Murphy, on how they work with customers he shared, “It starts out by working with them on identifying the business challenge they are ultimately trying to solve. We work with customers to address problems and challenges that impact their subscribers like slow broadband service, or performance, or an unmet market opportunity. We then use that as the goal of a network transformation initiative that will ultimately help improve the subscriber experience.”
Jason went on to indicate that they then translate the business needs and objectives into a series of technical challenges that then can be solved through network architecture and design best practices. For example:
Calix has worked with customers to help them apply design best practices to solve bandwidth issues and reconfigure networks to improve scale and performance. We have successfully migrated tens of thousands of subscribers using our field proven processes and automation capabilities to next generation access platforms and have helped our customers get ready to roll out new services. You can find out more by attending an upcoming webinar on September 5, “De-risking Network Transformation with Network Design Best Practices.” You can register by following this link . If you want to find out more about Calix Professional Services, by visiting our web page.
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How to set up Active Ethernet ONT services
Did you know you can configure “Any Port, Any Service” (APAS) on P-Series GPON ONTs via the E7?
Are you a Field Technician who installs and troubleshoots home networks containing Calix Gigacenters and 804Mesh Satellites? Do you use Calix Support Cloud to to manage, troubleshoot and support subscribers?
Starting with fundamentals of Wifi including the IEEE 802.11 standard, the 1-day Calix Home Wifi Technician Specialist virtual instructor-led course steps you through deployment considerations and best practices around a wireless home network with Calix premises equipment including 844E, 844GE, 800G, and 804Mesh. You will learn how to manage premises equipment and Wi-Fi configurations using Calix Support Cloud as well as diagnose and troubleshoot common home network issues. At the end of the course, you will be able to take an online assessment to test your knowledge and earn a Calix Wifi Technician badge.
Building on the success of its gigabit community build in the southern California suburb of Ontario, competitive carrier Inyo Networks is taking its fiber network expertise to northern California’s western Marin County. Home to many Bay Area business and entertainment leaders as well as a thriving agricultural economy, this area has suffered from broadband options that were severely lacking in terms of both speed and reliability. However, through the work of Inyo Networks and a state grant, the community of Nicasio will soon be experiencing broadband services and speeds that exceed those experienced by most of the rest of the country.
In Nicasio, Inyo Networks is leveraging the Calix AXOS E7-2 Intelligent Modular System and 844 GigaCenters to be the first service provider to bring 10 gigabit speeds to rural California residents over its NG-PON2 network. At first, Inyo Networks will roll out symmetrical gigabit services to every resident and business in Nicasio, allowing the community experience what a connection of that magnitude can enable for their lives. 10 gigabit services will follow shortly after as bandwidth demands grow to support new online applications.
Learn more about Inyo Network’s plans in Nicasio in this Calix press release and hear directly from Inyo Networks President and COO Nick Keeler in this interview with Carol Wilson at Broadband World News.
Effective immediately, please use the following shipping address for all Calix RMA product returns to our US warehouse:
Attn: Calix RMA #________
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