The Beacon
May 2019
Did the latest Calix release “train” arrive as scheduled? Absolutely. That is the number 1 reason why we shifted to a quarterly release cadence model - predictability. Hopefully you have seen the news from our 19.2 release announcements over the past two weeks. The second quarter release “train” arrived and delivered the latest advances across all of our software platforms - Calix Cloud, EXOS, and AXOS - as well as our expanding portfolio of Services.
Each quarter we will deliver new innovations in the middle of the second month (starting on the 2nd Tuesday). Our goal is to eliminate the burden of tracking timelines for individual products and systems. In this month’s edition of the Beacon you will find a recap of all the latest news from the past two weeks. Here are the highlights:
We also hope that the Beacon continues to serve as a useful vehicle for sharing news, technical updates, and best practices. If you have suggestions, please share them in our brief survey below.
Thank you for you continued support and partnership.
- Matt Collins, Chief Marketing Officer
AVP, Product Marketing Subscriber Experience,
Calix
With so many exciting enhancements across the entire Calix portfolio, here is a quick look at the top items coming from Calix Cloud this spring.
More ways to use Calix Support Cloud – With Call Outcome logging built into Calix Support Cloud, tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of your customer care operations is now easier than ever. It’s not just faster and more cost-effective to measure KPIs without a complex ticketing system, but also allows you to assess the impact your agents and processes have on improving the subscriber experience.
More ways to achieve FCC compliance – We first introduced the CAF Performance Testing Solution, partnering with Ookla in February allowing you to avoid the complexity of setting up, maintaining, and verifying your own test servers. We have now further enhanced it with the flexibility to choose your own Ookla test servers from Calix Support Cloud, if desired.
More accurate churn prediction – The predictive model is now more sophisticated based on learnings over a longer period of time, since introducing the Churn Prediction lens on Calix Marketing Cloud earlier this year. Now you can gauge churn risk with ever increasing precision and act before revenue impact with more confidence.
More ways to share subscriber insights – Marketers can now extend access to subscriber insights in new ways. Extending insights to internal departments and external agencies for collaboration are facilitated by managing access to different types of data via role-based access control.
More advanced platform – All Calix Cloud customers are being upgraded to a state-of-the-art microservices architecture that transforms how Calix develops, tests, and delivers new services. This will allow you to take advantage all the new and innovative product and technology advancements faster and more efficiently.
And of course, there are many more features to be excited about. Be sure to check out the Calix Cloud 19.2 release articles and webinars on the Calix Community for more details.
To hear directly from Pioneer Telephone on why they are excited about the new built-in call outcome logging, register for the Subscriber Experience Spotlight Webinar on June 26.
Product Marketing Director
New Markets/Premises, Calix
The latest enhancements to the Calix CAF Performance Testing, originally released in February as part of our EXOS and Calix Support Cloud solutions, include:
Dedicated Server Selection: In addition to using Ookla servers in the 16 FCC approved Internet Exchange Point (IXP) cities, service providers can now select their own Ookla test server. This gives service providers additional options to ensure optimal testing results are achieved.
Calix Managed Services: CAF Performance Testing Managed Services have been enhanced to deliver performance testing support to service providers throughout the entire process. This service includes developing pre-testing protocols, assistance in setting up tests groups, ensuring tests are routing for optimal results, guidance with reporting, and more.
Using the GigaCenter as a test client: Coming in the Fall of 2019, service providers with Calix Support Cloud and EXOS will be able to include GigaCenters as test clients for their performance testing. Calix worked with Ookla to enable a more efficient licensed client that will now allow testing over GigaCenters.
Service providers should begin pre-testing now!
Since launching the CAF Performance Testing feature, Calix has worked with several service providers to pre-test their networks and identify areas of concern prior to the required July 1, 2019 testing date. This pre-testing has allowed service providers to understand what results they will see and ensure they are compliant well before the deadline. Given the potential for significant financial penalties, Calix encourages providers to begin testing now.
As a partner to the industry, Calix wanted to ensure an end-to-end solution was available that leveraged networks already in place. For more information on this full solution and how to get start with pre-testing visit our CAF resources page. Additionally, register for our upcoming webinar titled “CAF Performance Testing: What you need to know”, taking place June 6, 2019 at 10am PT/1pm ET to hear helpful hints from pre-testing engagements, get answers to some of the most common questions, and hear all the latest updates.
The latest release of the Calix Smart Home and Business solution includes enhancements designed to help service providers improve the subscriber experience associated with the delivery of smart home services, including:
Improved Device Identification: Enhanced back-end processes result in more accurate identification of devices that are connected to home networks and displayed to consumers within the Calix Smart Home app
GigaSpire MAX Connectivity: Container-based functionality within EXOS allows for wireless connections to Bluetooth speakers for consumers seeking a premium audio experience
Reduce your time to market with Professional Services
Calix Services has also announced the availability of the Calix Whole Home Wi-Fi and Smart Home Enablement Service, designed to reduce the time to market associated with whole home and managed Wi-Fi services, as well as foundational smart home features. More information is available in the Services Spotlight below.
Service providers have a window of opportunity as a smart home channel
The Calix Smart Home and Business solution enables service providers to unlock the full potential of the smart home. And, while the long-term revenue potential of the smart home is obvious, service providers have recognized that its implementation is a multi-step journey that begins with sensational Wi-Fi coverage.
Recent market research from Parks Associates, documented in a new white paper (commissioned by Calix) titled “Open for Business: Future Flexibility for Smart Home Service,” indicates that smart home use cases and their value propositions are still evolving.
According to the report, most service providers have “lost the appetite for building and maintaining a proprietary platform in the face of relentless technological change and complexity.” Further, the report claims that “if past efforts have taught the industry anything, the ability to pivot quickly toward new opportunities is paramount.”
The Calix Smart Home and Business solution is designed to address these challenges. Based on an open, cloud-based platform (EXOS), the Calix Smart Home and Business solution is designed to take advantage of an expanding ecosystem of partners. Service providers no longer need to worry about picking one partner for a specific use case, then having to completely retool to take their business in another direction if that service doesn’t meet with market success.
More information
For more information on the Calix Smart Home and Business solution, please watch Consolidated Telcom’s video here. Additionally, view our recent Subscriber Experience Spotlight webinar "Taking Your Subscriber Experience to the Next Level with the New Calix Smart Home App"
Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Calix
In business, it’s critical to think about your customers or subscribers first. Without subscribers you don’t have a business and without happy subscribers you can’t grow your business.
So, when you roll out new services, you likely ask questions such as:
Will my existing subscribers buy this service?
Will this help me gain new subscribers?
With this in mind, we continue to focus our efforts on helping you automate your network to make the greatest impact on your subscribers, including the provisioning of services. Several key enhancements in the 19.2 AXOS release are focused within this area of operations. These include:
Simplified Services Profile Management – An example of this would be a common VoIP profile across your entire network. However, you might have regional SIP servers, based on your network design. Instead of having a different profile per region, you can push region-specific profiles so the service provisioner uses one single profile to provision services across all network regions.
Subscriber Profile Creation – Often network architects are more comfortable working within a CLI and therefore like to create service profiles in the CLI. However, network operations personnel typically work within the GUI. Now the profiles created in the CLI can be pulled from the AXOS system into the GUI within SMx (Services Management Connector) to ensure all personnel can easily work within their preferred interface.
Auto-Select ONT – When provisioning additional services to a subscriber, which could have multiple ONTs or just a single ONT, the system will auto-select ONTs to simplify the process.
Simplified Subscriber and Services Inventory Reporting – Wondering how many subscribers are taking specific services in your network? You can quickly find out with the new inventory report. You can easily figure out, for example, which regions utilize higher bandwidth services more frequently versus lower bandwidth services.
This is just a short list of the ways we’re helping you focus on your subscribers by simplifying services provisioning and management in your network in release 19.2. After you have looked at these enhancements, we’d love to get your feedback and input on what other enhancements you’d like to see in the future.
We are continuously updating our Professional, Managed, Support, Customer Success and Education Services to help you transform your business. Here are some of the new capabilities now available with 19.2:
Enhancements to our Remote Monitoring Services take a novel approach in processing network alarms by turning information from the events happening in your network into actionable intelligence. Many monitoring platforms can filter alarms and allow you to establish rules to handle them more efficiently, but the Calix applies machine-learning techniques to correlate alarms and present potential resolution paths. The analytics and reporting dashboard allows you to look at incidents over time to identify patterns and relationships between alarm events. With this capability, you can now develop targeted remediation and resolution programs to address problems proactively such as defective ONTs, voice service problems, ring protection issues, and defective backup batteries.
Watch our recent Remote Monitoring Service webinar replay on the the Top Customer Remote Monitoring Use Cases. You can also read the recent press release to find out more.
Updates to the Whole Home Wi-Fi and Smart Home Enablement Services help you take full advantage of the GigaSpire family. Calix professionals:
You can hear about Consolidated Telcom’s experience with the service in this new video.
Finally, we’ve updated both the Calix Marketing Cloud and Calix Support Cloud courses, which are included in new foundational learning paths for marketing and support services teams. The learning paths come with proficiency testing and achievement badging so employees can be educated, while given the ability to promote their accomplishments on social media.
Industry analysts say the most interesting things… but unfortunately their insights and knowledge are not widely available to those that are interested. To address that issue, Calix introduced a new series of perspectives articles – Analyst Insights – in which we invite industry analysts from across the communications sector to share their views on the business, technology, and consumer behaviors that are impacting the success of broadband service providers.
Our first two Analyst Insights were published in the last month. Each one is introduced in a short Calix Community blog and available for download. You can comment on each article in the blog and easily forward the link to others that will want to be part of the conversation.
5G Millimeter Wave Fixed Wireless Access; Factors for Success. Information about 5G Mobile networks, and its cousin, 5G mmWave Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) networks, fills our news feed multiple times each day. Pushing past the multitude of conflicting “firsts” and confusing braggadocio, IHS Markit Research Director Richard Webb provides his perspective on the factors of success in 5G millimeter wave fixed wireless access. Read the article…
Evolving Home Gateway Architecture to Enable the Smart Home. “Wi-Fi is no longer that nice-to-have convenience for wire-free Internet access on your laptop. It’s the nexus of your connected home and life.” IHS Markit Research Director John Kendall provides his perspective on the Wi-Fi challenges in the connected home and the opportunities for broadband service providers. “Simply connecting smart devices is not enough: there must be intelligence behind it.” Read the article…
More Analyst Insight articles are coming soon on topics including: pragmatic SDN, subscriber analytics, service provider marketing, edge computing, and the wild world of IoT. Stay tuned for more interesting perspectives from industry analysts. And if you know of an analyst you would like to hear from, let me know.
What’s your perspective?
And of course, there’s plenty more to read and share on the Calix Perspectives pages. I look forward to hearing your perspective.
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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.
Based in along the Northern California coast, Santa Cruz is an idyllic community located close to the high-tech center of Silicon Valley. With a sophisticated and tech-savvy subscriber base and an aging copper network, local ISP Cruzio looked to the future and moved forward with fiber.
Starting in the downtown area, Cruzio has been systematically expanding its fiber footprint out to serve a growing residential subscriber base. Now, with over 1000 premises reached by fiber, Cruzio was ready for the next step of elevating the subscriber experience.
The Calix GigaCenters have been installed in a portion of Cruzio’s subscriber homes and it is working towards replacing all legacy routers in the future to maintain that level of Wi-Fi experience for all subscribers.
While the subscriber experience has been elevated, AXOS has also allowed Cruzio to simplify its network operations. The tight integrations with Cruzio’s existing BSS and OSS solutions has allowed the ISP to lower support costs and the time associated with key processes, while introducing new automation capabilities to reduce manual errors.
Learn more about how Cruzio’s partnership with Calix is impacting its subscribers and its network operations in this Calix Customer Success Story video.
Role: Technical Support Representative
Location: Richardson, TX
Years of Service: 6 months
Calix Expertise: Software Case Support
School: University of Texas at Dallas
Favorite Movie: The Departed
Favorite Vacation Spot: White Sands – Mombasa
Fun Fact: I learned how to drive a stick shift when I was 11 years old
Any fears: Geckos! If someone can help me get over this before summer that’d be great
