AVP, Product Marketing Subscriber Experience,

Calix

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@IoTPamF

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:

• Start addressing issues before they arrive—reacting to subscribers after they express dissatisfaction via social media or support tickets would be too risky and damaging to their reputation in a highly competitive market.
• Be very thoughtful about how they engage with their subscribers—tailoring services based on simple demographic segmentation was too generic and not going to drive the subscriber experience they were aiming for.
• Focus on services that differentiate their business—rethinking their residential gateway strategy was going to be key to future-proofing their business.

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         

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Product Marketing Director

New Markets/Premises, Calix 

linkedin.com/in/bridget-watkins-8564343a/

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:

• ALL legacy carriers need to test—if you receive any type of high-cost funding, this is you!
• Choose your performance testing solution wisely—focus on a platform that is simple, non-invasive, and easy to implement, with a potential to drive new services.
• Understand your route—you can get from Amarillo to Dallas by way of Chicago – but why would you?  Ensure your traffic is routing efficiently for the best testing results and subscriber experience.
• Test early and often—more than 65 service providers have already started testing through the Calix Support Cloud so they can proactively identify any needed changes to optimize results.
• Don’t delay—the time is now. Resolving issues in your testing process can take weeks or months and no one wants to spend their holiday season with last minute testing issues.  Get your solution in place today so you can feel confident that you are ready to go.
• Pass the hassle—we are here to help. The Calix Professional Services team has a Broadband Performance Compliance Service that will assist you through the entire process. 

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.

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Senior Director, Premises Marketing, Calix

linkedin.com/in/owensgreg

@Gregzky99

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:

• Two distinct sections: ‘Managed Wi-Fi & Whole Home Wi-Fi Campaign Kit’ and ‘Smart Home Campaign Kit,’ which can be navigated using the graphic links at the top of the page.
• Approximately 20 short documents (under ‘Education’): These are tools using simple language to describe and define some common technical terms. Please feel free to post these directly to your web site or re-purpose them.
• Consumer Product Guides and product photos
  • GigaCenter and 804Mesh (in the ‘Managed Wi-Fi & Whole Home Wi-Fi Campaign Kit’)
  • GigaSpire and GigaMesh (in the ‘Smart Home Campaign Kit’).

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.

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Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Calix

linkedin.com/in/teresamcgaughey

@t_mcgoo

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. 

• First, if you’d like to be part of a feedback and demo sessions related to the Q2 AXOS SMx release, sign up here and we’ll contact you to schedule. 
• Second, if you’d like to be a part of similar evaluations and feedback sessions coming as part of the upcoming Q3 releases, you can sign up for that here.

Together, we are getting it right, to help you deliver value, even faster than before.

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Senior Director, Services Marketing, Calix

linkedin.com/in/thomasschroer

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:

• Making appropriate technology and process improvement to your operations
• Harmonizing workflows across organizations
• Training your employees
• Testing in controlled environments
• Working with a partner that can provide proper insights and best practices

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:

• Streamlining workflows across teams
• Transferring knowledge on technology concepts and best practices
• Enabling field operations

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.

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Solutions Marketing Director, Calix

linkedin.com/in/bluedoug

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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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.

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