3
Alcatel-Lucent Digital Home Care Solution
The Customer Challenge
When setting up triple-play services, you are naturally concerned about the
many operational challenges. The growing complexity of home networks
and the lack of knowledge of end users to manage and solve problems by
themselves almost inevitably increases your burden. Furthermore, real-time
services, such as video and voice, are highly sensitive to disruptions and
quality issues in the access or home environment.
The early stages of triple-play service deployments have revealed that the
lack of appropriate management solutions have frustrated both you and your
end users. End users often experience great difficulties in their attempts to
configure and activate home devices by themselves. Now, with the growing
complexity of the home environment, the potential sources of problems
have increased, ranging from simple software bugs and connectivity dis -
ruptions to the trickier issues of configuration and setup compatibility.
Any of these problems could easily affect the conditions under which you
deliver services to the consumer. Multiple service disruptions and poor
service quality will frustrate your end users, resulting in a surge of help-desk
calls, costly repair operations, dissatisfaction and churn. This translates into
lost revenue and higher OPEX, diminishing the prof itability of your triple-
play service offering. Figure 1 illustrates the challenges in home management.
Service Configuration
• Wrong service parameters
X
Customer Support Center
• No visibility of customer setting
• Lack of competence
X
Home Network Configuration
• Wrong configuration
• Not suitable to service
X
Network Operations
• No proactive maintenance
• No visibility over line and home
X
Line Qualification
• Unstable line
• Line not suitable for service
X
Field Operations
• No problem location
• No reliable diagnostics
X
• 27 percent of users experienced home net -
working problems – 31 percent of those
called the SP. (Parks Customer Survey)
• 30 percent of home networking devices
are returned! (Wall Street Journal)
• 70 percent of returned devices have No
Defect Found (NDF). (North American ILEC)
• Over 25 percent of consumers would like
to connect their TV and stereo to their
home network. (TDG, Consumer Survey)
• We received an average of one call per
subscriber during installation! (European
ILEC on IPTV service launch)
Figure 1. A Broad View of Digital Home Management Challenges: Where Things Could Go Wrong
W H A T D O C O N S U M E R S W A N T ?
• Value-added services and content they
can enjoy
• Services that work easily without requiring an
understanding of complex technology issues
• Quality on par with, or even better than what
they experienced before
• Services that work smoothly and providers
who take care of making them work
W H A T R E A L I T Y D O Y O U FA C E ?
• Accountability for service delivery, now highly
dependent on the home environment
• Millions of home networks and home devices
to support a broader range of services
• Customer expectation for the highest service
quality – even for the most sensitive real-time
services
• xDSL infrastructure, which is often stretched
to its performance limits
