Home Network Management for HFC Access

Optimize the delivery & management of Wi-Fi, triple-play & the connected home

ARRIS Home Network Management products simplify the delivery, management and support of advanced subscriber services, helping you keep up with the steady stream of new devices and customer demands for more bandwidth, mobility, and choice.

Key business benefits

• Keep up with rapidly evolving in-home network service and technology
• Unified view of subscribers networks and connectivity across business operations
• Deliver new revenue generating services, quickly and profitably
• Reduce operational expense with consistent and effortless subscriber experience management to maximize satisfaction

How it works

• ECO Service Management provides visibility, control and automation using a common framework for service delivery, assurance and operations management across the service portfolio.
• ECO Service Management abstracts the complexity and variability of multiple in-home device types, management protocols, software, and service delivery systems.
• ECO Service Management presents device and service quality within the context of the subscriber for operations rolls from installation through on-going support roles. This is accomplished through big data aggregation and analytics of management and diagnostic data from devices, endpoints, and elements.

ECO Wi-Fi home solution

The home has changed radically over the past decade. Consumers have shown an insatiable appetite for applications and services delivered via personal mobile devices. Traffic over Wi-Fi has increased exponentially and Video – both over-the-top and managed video – delivered over Wi-Fi makes network problems immediately visible to consumers. This coupled with Mobile device usage has created demand for greater coverage, high performance, and high quality.

Wi-Fi is a huge challenge for operators. Troubleshooting Wi-Fi problems is difficult because the network is invisible and there are many sources of interference. It creates long technical support calls, unnecessary truck rolls, and unnecessary equipment returns. The rapid rise in Wi-Fi devices and corresponding traffic has exceeded the capacity and coverage capabilities of many residential gateways. Consumers have little or no visibility into what is happening on their network and Retail vendors are attempting to capitalize on this opportunity by delivering their own solutions direct to the consumer. This creates additional support issues for the broadband service provider when dealing with unmanaged equipment providing Wi-Fi.

However, there is a real opportunity to turn Wi-Fi into an advantage -- by delivering high quality Wi-Fi, and increasing customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing operational expenses.

The ECO Wi-Fi Home Solution is a comprehensive Wi-Fi offering that encompasses software elements that reside on the home CPE, provide data collection, analysis, and policy optimization in the cloud, and assurance applications for operations personnel and mobile applications for subscribers to remotely manage, view, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi in the home.

The ECO Wi-Fi Home applications provide visibility into the home and Wi-Fi troubleshooting capability:

• ECO Assist is the web-based Wi-Fi call customer support troubleshooting application that enables interactive troubleshooting when a customer calls with a technical issue. ECO Assist may also be used to delivery troubleshooting capabilities to field technicians.
• ECO Self-Service is a subscriber mobile app that enables subscribers to view and manage their home network and solve basic but essential issues such as adding new devices to their home network.

ECO Wi-Fi Home device control solution is a network management and control plane stack that enables Wi-Fi management. It is composed of the following components:

• The Home Network Controller (HNC) runs on the residential gateway in the home. The HNC implements band steering, BSS steering, AP steering, client steering, airtime fairness, and dynamic channel selection.
• Home Network Extender protocol (HNE) Server runs on the gateway and HNE clients run on subordinate wireless access points. The HNE protocol enables discovering new access points, synchronizing Wi-Fi configuration, and transmitting statistical information used to determine steering actions.
• ECO Agent provides the most robust and widely deployed CWMP protocol stack in the market, and implements support for TR-157 Amendment 10 and TR-181 Issue 2 Amendment 10 support for efficient bulk data transmission to the ECO Wi-Fi Cloud.

ECO Wi-Fi Cloud is a suite of remote management products for managing the home Wi-Fi service:

• ECO Manage is the ARRIS TR-069 ACS product. Today TR-069 is the de facto protocol for retrieving management and diagnostic information from the subscriber home LAN across cable, telco, and satellite markets. It traverses firewalls, structures data in rich, standard data models, and has an active standards body that continues to invest in remote management protocols.
• ECO Collect is the ARRIS data acquisition product that collects management information from TR-069 and SNMP enabled CPE and CMTS equipment, mobile applications, and integrates with other systems as data sources.
• ECO Connect provides XMPP connectivity to LAN devices to facilitate TR-069 Annex K XMPP Connection Requests.

Wi-Fi Customer Experience

ARRIS offers professional services that enable operators to understand, baseline, plan and execute prioritized improvements at every stage of the Wi-Fi journey, while maximizing ROI and business value along the way.

From Wi-Fi call driver analysis and CPE data-model consulting, to master system integration and post-deployment services, we identify the quick wins that can bring results today, in addition to defining and integrating the longer term next generation solutions.

With focus on the Wi-Fi Customer Experience, ARRIS brings the needed independent services, guidance and tools that enable operators to navigate the home Wi-Fi challenge successfully.

How we help

• Lower volume of calls into customer service
• Fix plant issues before they became customer impacting
• Reduce number of repeat truck rolls
• Improve quality of technician visits

How we work

ARRIS leverages a development operations (DevOps) approach to infuse its software solutions with the highest possible quality, while speeding the delivery of new features and capabilities. By fostering a culture of constant communication throughout the product development lifecycle, DevOps helps us quickly identify, reduce, diagnose and overcome issues to significantly reduce failure rates in the field and their impacts on our customers. As part of this approach, our managed release process also enables us to introduce new features on a consistent basis, build customer feedback into our solutions throughout the development process and ensure that our software is stringently tested under real-world conditions - before deployment.