BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.
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FTTH Case sTudy Back-Offce Automation Is Key to Broadband Profts When Frontier Communications purchased Verizon assets in several states, it found that integrating them was a challenge. ETI's Triad made the job easier. By Chris Beisner / ETI Software Solutions I n 2010, Frontier Communications acquired from Verizon nearly 200,000 customers, 8,000 new staf members and a complex array of legacy Verizon billing and back-ofce systems. To minimize its costs, Frontier agreed to lease the Verizon systems for only a short time. Its challenge was, in the time allotted, to successfully take full control of billing, provisioning and monitoring these customers with as little disruption as possible to the customers, their services or Frontier's cash fow. Tis was a steep mountain to climb in a very short time. With help from ETI Software Solutions, Frontier accomplished this task within the allotted time and under budget. ThE FRONTIER ChAllENgE Te former Verizon subscribers were spread across 14 states and included customers on both fber-to-the-home and copper networks. Te FTTH subscribers were supported by multiple FTTH technologies, along with PSTN gateways, core service routers, VoD systems and digital addressable control systems – all purchased from diferent vendors, including Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Tellabs, GenBand, Juniper and SeaChange. To take full control of the new subscribers, Frontier had to address all these systems and their requirements. Te frst priority for Frontier was solving the provisioning challenges of the Motorola Digital Addressable Controller (DAC), the brains behind the set-top boxes, because this device 14 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com accounted for the largest percentage of daily provisioning events. Te journey from customerinitiated service request ("Add HBO to my account") to delivery can be long and winding. For many providers, provisioning is a manual process that involves a number of handofs, starting with customer service and ending with network operations or fulfllment. Known throughout the industry as a "swivel chair" process, manual provisioning can be laborintensive, slow and error-prone. For this reason, automation is not a luxury but a necessity. "Te amount of work to build a system in-house to implement and manage this integration [with the DAC] along with all the other technologies would have taken years, but we only had seven months," says Jesse Ross, Frontier's information technology manager for OSS/BSS applications. "We also knew that maintaining integrations to all these systems was going to be an ongoing challenge as we continue to roll out new services such as VoIP and cloud computing. It made sense to have a third party that can handle complex integrations and maintain them over the long haul." When Frontier approached ETI and described the disparate technologies and vendors it had to integrate, ETI saw that the buy-versusbuild decision was an easy one because ETI's Triad software is already integrated and deployed out of the box with most of the technologies used in the networks Frontier bought. As a bonus, ETI would be able to provide all the provisioning | July 2013