Considering ATT movement into cable broadband business, here are some links
for those interested in NN cable broadband solutions including some contracts, like that with
Suburban Cable Television, operator of multiple cable systems in the United States
serving about 990,000 customers in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey,
or
COGECO Cable Canada Inc., Canada's fourth largest cable television company
newbridge.com
prodweb.newbridge.com:80/news/releases/19970710.html
newbridge.com
In the U.S. cable industry, the demand for more efficient enterprise-wide communications
solutions comes after several years of industry consolidation. Mergers, acquisitions and
alliances have created highly distributed multi-site environments that require cost-effective and
seamless integration.
Increasingly, cable companies are demanding an
integrated delivery system that can reduce operating
expenditures for internal communications as well as
provide them with a transport network that enables them
to evolve their services as customers demand. They need
a network capable of delivering guaranteed bandwidth for
mission-critical applications and low operational costs in
the face of high customer churn.
In 1996, Suburban Cable, a thriving operator of multiple
cable systems in the northeastern United States,
confronted these issues when deciding on a plan for
upgrading its network. With more than one million
customers in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, Suburban Cable's commitment to
customer service had already placed it among the nation's top 15 cable companies.
Suburban Cable envisioned a multiservices network that would be flexible enough to handle
the growing demands of internal traffic. At the same time, the company wanted to capitalize
on opportunities presented by non-conventional revenue sources -- such as multimedia --
which they could transport as an alternative carrier.
Suburban Cable's decision for a multiservices network came at a time when it was reviewing
its in-house operations. The review recommended that customer satisfaction and cost savings
could best be achieved by centralizing Suburban Cable's corporate functions, including
information services, human resources, engineering, marketing, accounting and purchasing.
Having mapped out its network requirements, Suburban Cable sat down with several
vendors. The company concluded that a multiservices core platform over ATM could best
meet its plans. This included centralizing internal communications services and adding support
for services that customers would come to demand such as high speed digital Internet access,
digital video and remote connection to the corporate intranet for home workers. After a
careful analysis of each proposal, Newbridge got the nod for providing the ATM
multiservices platform and Fujitsu would supply the SONET systems to interconnect the high
speed backbone.
Flexibility was an important factor, too.
"We looked at Newbridge's ability to provide quality of service (QoS), and at the variety of
adaptation cards that were available for the particular chassis the company was going to
install," said David Chamberlain, Vice President, Information Services at Suburban Cable.
Also compelling for Suburban Cable was that Newbridge has the breadth of product
required to solve the cable company's multiple needs. With the MainStreetXpress 36170
Multiservices Switch and MainStreetXpress 36150 Access Switch, Suburban Cable is able
to build a comprehensive high speed transport backbone with SONET interconnection.
Indeed, the 36170 and 36150 switches provide Suburban Cable with precisely what it wants:
an extremely high speed, low delay transport technology, capable of supporting any type of
user traffic, including voice, data and video applications.
The Newbridge Solution
Today the backbone is comprised of several SONET rings stretching from central
Pennsylvania through northern Delaware to central and southern New Jersey. Behind the
rings is an ATM network consisting of four MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switches
and 27 MainStreetXpress 36150 Access Switches. The 36170s are used as backbone hubs
with the 36150s homing into the nearest 36170 switch. The main hub site is located in Oaks,
Pennsylvania where all traffic virtually begins or ends.
"The Newbridge ATM multiservices platform can simultaneously support virtual private
networks and IP services including Internet, intranets and extranets," said Robert Lawrence,
Executive Vice President of Suburban Cable. "Our new network enables us to offer frame
relay, private line and ATM services to competitive local exchange carriers, Internet service
providers (ISPs), interexchange carriers and other enterprises."
One of the first uses that Suburban Cable has made of the extensive backbone is to enable
access to a centralized billing and customer care database for customer service and order
entry throughout its regional offices. All calls from Suburban Cable customers are now routed
to a centralized call center. Customers can either order new service or register a request for
corrective action. Because the call center is remotely located from the main site at Oaks --
the site of the database -- the system requires real-time usage as well as continuous network
availability.
"The network has given us the ability to increase efficiency, reduce operating costs and
centralize our whole customer service strategy," said Chamberlain. "We've been able to tie
together all of our locations, as well as deliver all our internal and remote telephony needs and
access data across the network. Since we've put in the network, we've been able to see an
enormous amount of value add."
In fact, the company's Customer Satisfaction Center is saving Suburban Cable close to US
$1 million per year in telephony cost reduction alone. Because interoffice calls throughout the
region can now be transmitted across the ATM backbone, there are no long distance
telephone calls. Prior to the network, Suburban Cable had leased 175 circuits from the
incumbent operator. The Customer Satisfaction Center approach has also enabled Suburban
Cable to reduce the number of its billing centers from five to one.
Left to right Jeff Razey, Newbridge Account
Manager; David Chamberlain, Suburban
Cable Assistant VP, Information Service; Dan
Walter, Suburban Cable Manager, Wide Area
Network
One of the big traffic sources for the Customer Satisfaction Center is pay-per-view
authorization process. By utilizing computer telephony integration supported across the
network to access the centralized database, the system verifies a subscriber's status, at which
point the set-top box is activated for a requested event. This requires an almost
round-the-clock availability of the backbone network, because subscriptions to pay-per-view
events are typically performed close to the scheduled time. A popular event can flood the
network with a large amount of traffic which is bursty in nature, but the 36170 and 36150
switches on Suburban Cable's network are ideally suited to accommodate the instant and
varying bandwidth required for this type of traffic.
Conversely, as time progresses and the demand for pay-per-view services increases, the
scalable architecture of the Newbridge equipment will keep Suburban Cable ahead of the
game. As increased customer demand forces increased bandwidth requirements, the 36170
and 36150 switch combination will incrementally expand to meet those needs, thus providing
efficient capital investment and overall capital investment protection.
Customer satisfaction has increased, too. Suburban Cable's capacity to answer customers'
calls within FCC criteria has climbed to the mid-90 per cent range.
Suburban Cable's engineering department benefits from the centralized network as well. In
the past, all schematics and topology maps for the thousands of miles of HFC (hybrid fiber
coax) had to be mailed to project managers throughout the regions. But now with the
database, and the ATM backbone which the data runs over, all designs can be accessed
remotely with the latest node updates and plant information.
Suburban Cable's newest service to subscribers is high speed Internet access. Suburban
Cable aggregates all Internet access through a router at Oaks in order to consolidate into a
single network access point (NAP). User access is provided through cable modems to the
nearest radio frequency (RF) headend; at that point the IP-based traffic is intercepted by a
MainStreetXpress 36150 Access Switch co-located at the RF headend, and transported
over the ATM network back to the NAP gateway to Oaks via the 36170 hub.
End-to-End Network Management
To manage its network, Suburban is using the state-of-the-art MainStreetXpress 46020
Network Manager. With its center-weighted network, service and policy management, the
46020 enables end-to-end network command and control.
"The 46020, in and of itself, is an enormous savings to Suburban Cable," says Dan Walter,
Manager, Wide Area Networks. "Without it we would have to have dial-up lines to our
remote sites and physically drive there. It could literally take a day to provision circuits
between two points. When we first built the network, we did not have the 46020 installed.
So between Harrisburg and Atlantic City we did an awful lot of driving."
Suburban Cable has been able to reduce its debt-equity ratio significantly while spending
several million dollars to build the network -- a key indicator that the Newbridge solution is
paying off.
"Our operating costs continue to go down, even though we're continuing to spend more in
capital," said Chamberlain. |
