The Beacon
June 2019

At this year’s ConneXions conference, we will feature a stellar line-up of inspiring stories from people who are leading business and organizational transformations. We will challenge the boundaries of innovation and inspire you to lead in new way. Over the coming months we will continue to update you on the exciting stories we will bring to life.
Today, I am excited to announce that Mike Abrashoff, a former US Naval Commander, will be a featured keynote in our General Session. Mike will share his amazing organizational transformation experience in which he took command of the worst performing ship in the Navy’s Pacific Fleet and in just 12 months, turned it into the best ship in the entire Navy - with the same crew. You will be inspired.
Connexions 2019 is shaping up to be our best ever. In addition to incredible speakers, you can expect to network with over 2,000 of your peers, engage in education classes, collaborate in Circles of Success roundtables, choose from 35+ breakout sessions in our streams focused on how you can Elevate, Simplify and Accelerate your business. In these streams you can expect to:
And don’t forget the golf, the Spa and world-class entertainment! Today is the day…to take a stand against the status quo. To harness the power of data. To make connected homes smart. To create the last network you’ll ever have to build. We can help.
Join us at ConneXions October 26 – 29 in Las Vegas. Registration is open.
Submitting an order with Calix is now as easy as signing your name. Today we are announcing Smart Quotes, a whole new way to order from Calix. Smart Quotes allow for faster ordering by enabling your procurement teams to prepare a quote, from which you can order with a simple signature.
In addition to streamlining the order process, Smart Quotes also bring these benefits:
Click below to let us know if you would like to start leveraging the new Calix Smart Quote option.
AVP, Product Marketing Subscriber Experience,
Calix
It may sound too good to be true, but it should come as no surprise if you caught last month’s Calix press release featuring Pioneer Telephone Cooperative.
Pioneer, a Calix customer since 2004, has always been committed to investing in latest technologies and best practices to ensure their rural and suburban subscribers have as good (if not better) experiences than urban residents. What is unique about this multi-service telecommunications corporation, providing service to 53 counties across Oklahoma and Southern Kansas, is that they are taking a multi-dimensional approach to delivering exceptional subscriber experience.
I was in Kingfisher, Oklahoma recently to see their business in action. They really act on their vision in everything they do. This focus is apparent in many ways from how they structure their organization with a newly created a cross-functional Experience Management team to how they test and trial new solutions and approaches in every department I visited.
In an effort to completely own the subscriber experience when subscribers are on their network, Pioneer has set out to:
Later this month, their marketing and customer care leads are joining us on a live webinar to share some of their unique initiatives that align with these goals. And of course, to give us a closer look at the 59-fold ROI from their first marketing campaign. Spoiler alert! The secret is in the segmentation.
Don’t forget to register for the upcoming Subscriber Experience Spotlight Webinar on June 26, 2019
Product Marketing Director
New Markets/Premises, Calix
The last month brought some long-anticipated news from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Due to lack of clarity on specific areas of the order along with petitions filed from multiple groups, on May 30 the FCC announced a six-month delay to the test requirements. The new deadline (which will be in Q1 2020) provides no opportunity for service providers to put their pencils down. Instead, you should be actively pre-testing your performance testing solutions to ensure they are demonstrating the full capabilities of the network you’ve built.
Mike Romano, Senior Vice President of Industry Affairs and Business Development for NTCA, joined us for a breaking news alert on May 31 to recap the decision and provide guidance as to what will happen next. If you missed the video of this breaking alert, you can find it here.
In our June 6 Webinar, CAF Performance Testing—What you need to know, we shared some of the key updates, observations, and best practices we’ve seen as companies are more actively pre-testing:
The Calix CAF Performance Testing solution, with EXOS and Calix Support Cloud, provides a turn-key solution for service providers to utilize their existing network infrastructure for testing. At a minimum you need:
1. Calix Support Cloud—the test Controller, and
2. EXOS, along with GigaSpires (today) or GigaCenters (Fall 2019)
That’s it. It’s just that simple. If you want to test on GigaCenters, act now! This is the perfect opportunity to get your EXOS and Calix Support Cloud agreements in place and ensure your network routing is optimized to perform the testing.
As always, visit our web page for the latest updates on CAF Performance Testing.
By now, you may have heard that we offer Marketing Consults to help you design strategies and tactics that you can use to create and market compelling Managed Wi-Fi and Smart Home services. These services can increase your revenue, while providing your subscribers with optimal support and in-home Wi-Fi coverage.
We also offer a wide range of resources on our Marketing and Educational Materials page—such as promotional graphics, written content, videos, and Calix product information— that are free for you to use in your marketing campaigns.
In March, we introduced you to ‘Digital Dilemmas’, a series of four short (30 second) videos, designed for use in your social media campaigns. We’re happy to announce that we recently added four new videos in this series. Again, designed to be fun, lighthearted, and educational. Our objective is simple; if watching a 30-second video can provide your subscribers with enough information to avoid calling your Help Desk, then the videos are successful.
If you haven’t visited the Marketing and Educational Materials page lately, you will find:
Ready to Kick-Start Your Managed Wi-Fi Marketing?
In response to one of the most common questions heard during the marketing consults — “Where should I start?”—we also recently announced our ‘Kick-Start Initiative’.
How does it work? We schedule a Marketing Consult to identify your specific marketing or business objectives, then partner with you to develop custom campaigns and/or marketing materials designed to drive additional sales. After the materials are created, we will genericize and share the content for others to use. This process allows us to keep making fresh content available, while developing materials that are meaningful and relevant.
More information
If you haven’t yet scheduled your free Marketing Consult, I encourage you to do so today. If you’ve already had a Marketing Consult or have already launched a solution, feel free to set up another Marketing Consult. The second call can focus on advanced sales strategies, ideas for the Kick-Start initiative, or your specific needs and objectives.
We’ve thoroughly enjoyed the hundreds of one-to-one conversations we’ve had over the past two years, in nearly every American state and several Canadian provinces, not to mention the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa, and the Netherlands Antilles. We look forward to future discussions, working together to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.
Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Calix
Transforming your business can be a challenge. You can spend weeks, months, and even years thinking about how to do it right. You can plan out your goals and clearly define what success will be, only to realize that while you created the ultimate plan for transformation, the world has passed you by.
So how do you keep your subscribers happy and beat the competition, while successfully transforming your business in a a fast-moving world? You should approach it in phases, so you can stop, take a moment to look around to make sure you are still on a good path, and then get back to executing. The benefit of this approach is you never get too far off course before you have a chance to correct. In the long run, this approach gets you to your goal faster and more successfully.
If you’ve been watching Calix closely this may sound familiar, especially if you remember this previous blog on DevOps and are now watching our quarterly releases. We just completed our latest round with the Q2 release. On AXOS, some of you have been involved in field evaluations of the software, including demos and feedback sessions related to the latest capabilities in our AXOS Services Management Connector (SMx). These evaluations and feedback sessions are part of the process in the development of our platforms. This is when we stop, lift our heads up to look around, and make sure we continue to be on the right path to deliver value to you, our customers. Through this partnership, you can be sure you’re getting a solution that will meet your needs today and well into the future.
We have two opportunities for you to take part in this process.
Together, we are getting it right, to help you deliver value, even faster than before.
From our experience of helping Calix customers introduce new technology and services into their networks, we have seen five recurring activities that help companies be successful. These include:
Another finding is that the process customers utilize in taking new services from strategy to reality vary, and only about 20 percent utilize a formal process for implementing new services into their network. The majority use an informal approach of gathering feedback through employees, while some just assess the technology without considering the operational impact on existing workflows.
Whole Home Wi-Fi and Smart Home Enablement Service is a new Professional Services offering to help you operationalize new services more efficiently. The service is delivered in a series of remote and onsite workshops to help you in three main areas that impact successful technology and service implementation which are:
We’ve found that allowing field installers to work through service delivery steps in controlled environments that reflect actual deployment scenarios enables better orchestration, testing, and validation of the service activation and delivery workflows. It also allows service provider teams to see what parts of the service delivery process are impacted by the introduction of new features or technologies. Lastly, it helps in determining what additional activities need to be incorporated or optimized during subscriber onboarding.
You can find out more about the service and its benefits in our recent webinar replay, Take Your Wi-Fi and Smart Home Services from Strategy to Reality, and in a new video on how the Whole Home Wi-Fi and Smart Home Enablement Service helped Consolidated Telcom’s operations team.
It is widely acknowledged, with over 63 percent market share within North America, that cable operators are winning the war for broadband subscribers. Most residential cable deployments are based on an HFC (hybrid fiber coax) architecture that leverages gigabit capable DOCSIS technology. But strong 5G competition coupled with new subscriber demands are forcing many operators to give pause. Based on recent 5G customer trials, the technology can offer service parity to the best residential cable offering. Surprisingly, less than 20 percent of cable executives consider FTTH a strategic priority and opt for incremental, kick-the-can-down-the-road, HFC investment.
So how will cable operators maintain a competitive edge?
Interestingly, the telecom industry has historically approached technology and network upgrades as a binary decision. Citing the cost of FTTH, cable operators prefer to upgrade their existing “brownfield” networks with DOCSIS iterations, while relegating FTTH to “greenfield” master planned communities. But this either/or strategy may not be the single and best approach.
A detailed cost analysis conducted in 2018 by Calix and CCI Systems compared the migration from a traditional HFC network - in low, medium, and high-density serving areas - to either a fiber-deep Node+0 or a FTTH network architecture. The analysis yielded results that depart widely from accepted industry practices. It revealed that FTTH is the best upgrade choice for low- and medium-density serving areas, with lower CAPEX and OPEX to that of a fiber-deep solution. However, the best choice was less clear in high-density serving areas. Here, Node+0 offers much lower rollout costs than FTTH due the excessive burden of replacing large quantities of coaxial drops with fiber. As operators move away from RF video deliver to an IP unicast model, the right technology and architecture choice becomes less obvious.
Typically, a small percentage of customers—the elite 10-20 percent as I like to call them—consume the majority of a cable operators’ network capacity. Historically, operators segment nodes to address the capacity constraints—and then they wash, rinse, repeat. While this methodology relieves the immediate network issues, it is simply not sustainable. If operators begin to think differently and leverage a software enabled fiber overlay for the elite few, FTTH becomes a network “relief” valve. Building on the 2018 study, Calix and CCI Systems determined that approaching cable network evolution with a hybrid solution can save operators anywhere from 48 to 66 percent in contrast to either a Node +0 or complete FTTH overhaul. Hey Cable Guy, 5G is coming. You need more than DOCSIS.
To learn more about how a hybrid solution can help cable operators defend against 5G, download the study results, and learn more about deploying both remote PHY along with a software enabled fiber overlay here.
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Enhancing job skills is a never-ending process that doesn’t stop even as summer is upon us. As you look at the projects you have coming up or going on right, now you need to ask yourself, “What do my team members need to know to be successful,” and “Do I have qualified people to support my network and service delivery objectives?”
Calix Education Services can help you accelerate your team’s expertise, and we want to help you with our Summer of Learning promotion! Now through June 28th, you can purchase self-paced or instructor led public courses at a 25% discount. This includes
Purchase your training at the special price before June 28th and you can can take your eLearning courses at your convenience or register for available public instructor led courses through the end of 2019.
Whether you are wanting to dive into E7-2 AXOS platform training, get trained and tested on whole home Wi-Fi, or get upskilled on Smart Home technology, Calix Education Services can help you build a well-trained team with the right mix of technical know-how and hands-on skills to give you a competitive edge. You can learn about the available Calix Academy courses on our website or contact a Calix Education Services expert to find out more about the Summer of Learning promotion. If you want to buy directly from the Calix Academy use the promotional code SUMMER25 at checkout.
Rural Missouri’s SEMO Electric Cooperative has built out its membership to reach 16,000 premises over six counties with electrical service. However, those members were suffering from a lack of broadband options. While some had dial-up or satellite, many had no high-speed options available. After losing out on economic development opportunities and seeing members move out of the area, GoSEMO was born as a subsidiary to build out a fiber broadband network.
The GoSEMO team partnered with other electric cooperatives in the state, like Co-Mo and United Electric Cooperatives, to gather best practices and lessons learned to deliver a successful broadband service. Through these partnerships, GoSEMO was introduced to Calix and its partner Conexon, which helped support the early stages of funding and feasibility studies.
Today, GoSEMO is connecting members to a network capable of gigabit speeds, built on Calix Support Cloud, GigaCenters, and E7-2 Intelligent Modular System. This network is helping to enable growth in the area, which GoSEMO expects to experience for many years to come.
Learn more about GoSEMO’s path to broadband service and its future plans for network expansion in this Calix Success Story video.
Role: Customer Success Manager – Calix Support Cloud
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Years of Service: 1.5 years
Calix Expertise: Calix Support Cloud SME
School: Boise State University, Lindenwood University, & Grand Canyon University
Favorite Movie: Shawshank Redemption
Favorite Vacation Spot: Moorea, Tahiti
Fun Fact: My longest drive was 371 yards in Women’s World Long Drive Competition (Golf)
What are you most excited about? In August, I am flying to Germany to cycle 300+ miles from Frankfurt to Hamburg with one of my close friends. In the end, several classmates and best friends are flying to meet us in Hamburg from France, Czech Republic, and Denmark. It is going to be an epic trip!