Incognito Insights

News and Awards General

We are thrilled to announce that Incognito Software Systems, a leading provider of automated OSS solutions spanning broadband service orchestration, device management, and network...

General Service Orchestration

In a fast-paced digital landscape, communication service providers (CSPs) are continually seeking cutting-edge solutions to streamline operations, enhance service delivery, and adapt to...

Best Practices General

It can be hard to keep up with the fast-growing, fast-moving, and highly competitive telecom industry. The industry's global nature, encompassing players located in every market and region...

News and Awards General Service Orchestration DOCSIS

In our connected world, subscribers have come to think of their Internet connection as another utility – something that should be there whenever they need or want it. However, to attract...

General Automation Device Management Service Orchestration

In today's connected world, reliable broadband services are no longer just a luxury, they are a necessity. From remote work and online education to staying connected with family and...

News and Awards General

It's that time of year when everything seems to sparkle, and celebration is in the air. Here at Incognito, we're grateful for the year we've had. By working with customers, industry bodies,...

General Device Management

With more homes becoming smart and digital, service providers now face the challenge of contending with increasing operational complexity in the residential network and service...

General DDI

Cable providers today are under more pressure than ever to offer a gigabit experience to enterprise and residential customers. Recent updates with DOCSIS 3.1 have dramatically increased...

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It’s easy to assume that everything is running smoothly when you can’t see any visible signs of wear and tear. But just like your car or home, your provisioning solution also requires...

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The readers of this blog already know that customer care is a malleable and ever-evolving concept, prone to major differences from one region to the next, and even from one customer’s...

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Follow the timeline as we highlight some of the major evolutions in the network communications technology, including many different people and a variety of unique devices:

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Service provider WiFi within the subscriber household shows no signs of deceleration. Information Handling Services (IHS) markit predicts thatnine in ten global broadband households will...

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Critical Considerations for Critical Services It’s every provider’s nightmare — mission critical systems go down either due to technical issues, power outages, or natural disasters....

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Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) Continues Its Expansion Last year, growth in the fiber market exceeded the expectations of many industry analysts. In the USA alone,more than 30 millions homes...

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OTT Video Continues To Drive Exponential Growth Video already represents over 60% of online network traffic and will continue to grow unabated as more subscribers shift their viewing from...

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Is it all down to stress? Can you keep your cool?

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CSRs are traditionally given negative feedback if call lengths or volumes increase. Metrics may include:

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Software IT projectson average run 66% over budget and take 33% longer than scheduled, so you shouldn’t ignore how vendors answer the question of project cost and duration. Most vendors...

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Some of these vital considerations are:

General

There were various adages in the world of retail over the years; for example “the customer is king,” and “the customer is always right”. The point of these sayings is that our customers...

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In fairness, virtualization is not a new subject. In fact, you could even say it has been with us for several decades when originally referred to as ‘Time-Sharing’ in mini and mainframe...

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Taking a ride on the software migration experience highway does not have to be a daunting task. The Incognito Professional Services team makes simplifying software migration processes their...

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Wi-Fi Everywhere Market Report’s Global Telecom Trends for 2016 indicates that wireless devices are set to overtake wired devices in terms of IP traffic, and in 2016 will account for over...

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Here at Incognito, we’ve made it our goal to lead the charge for constant improvement. I’m happy to report that 2015 has been a year of much success. Here are some highlights from the year:

General DDI

Basically, it’s time to stop the excuses. IPv6 is the future and ignoring it could put you at risk because no business can truly expect to grow without IPv6. Already, the fastest-growing...

General DOCSIS

Updated August 27, 2019 Originally published in October 2015, this technical guide is designed to equip network professionals with the information they need to fully understand DOCSIS 3.1,...

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Here are five reasons why you should adopt NFV for your CPEs:

IoT General

Most of these devices communicate via wireless methods, but we have seen multiple protocols and frequencies used to enable this. They include Insteon, X10, ZigBee, Z-Wave, UPB, Bluetooth...

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History has shown that with each extreme of the spectrum, specific advantages can be achieved. Typically, the ideal placement is somewhere on the spectrum that affords you the opportunity...

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Unlike the days of the floppy disk and its set size of 1.44MB, most of today’s data is obtained via the cloud. Cloud content like streaming video and music is the driving force behind this...

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Travelers — especially those on leisure — will use their devices more frequently, from finding the best lunch spot to sharing their experiences on social networks. Those on business will...

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The industry — through organizations like Broadband Forum, CableLabs, and the Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers — has responded with a number of solutions to automate tasks,...

Best Practices General

Integration with multiple legacy systems: Different backend systems, like billing and operations support, can cause integration headaches when creating a customer portal. How will you avoid...

General

Incognito Professional Services is here to help. With over 20 years of experience delivering innovative end-to-end solutions in the IP space, our world-class team has the industry and...

Best Practices General

This shift isn’t just specific to data services. Help Scout recently compiled data from a variety of sources that found there are a number of reasons that businesses everywhere are...

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Over the years, we have seen solutions from TM Forum and CableLabs that help standardize certain aspects of the CSP plant and similar initiatives in the CPE world with Reference Design Kit...

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We’re talking about mobile of course, so you get to see more powerful and flashier wearables: handsets, LTE-based smartwatches, smart meters, near-field communication (NFC) function...

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What does this mean for you, as a broadband service provider? For starters, subscribers expect WiFi hotspots to be everywhere. Last year, a study found there was one WiFi hotspot for every...

Best Practices General

By now, we know that Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) is a highly efficient protocol that delivers per-subscriber service usage information directly from the CMTS. This protocol is...

Best Practices General

Internet service providers use KPIs as a way to assess the performance of organizations, business units, or systems on an ongoing basis. But building KPIs out of a mountain of reports and...

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Why Title II now? Early in 2014, the court ruled that the FCC could not enforce two key rules in the Open Internet Order of 2010 — no blocking and no discrimination of traffic. The reason...

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They want mobile phones, WiFi, and data service everywhere and anywhere. They want automated home-network systems that learn their unique routines and help them with daily mundane tasks....

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Converging Networks and The Internet of Things The digital universe is expanding at an astonishing rate. Research from Intel estimates that between 2006 and 2020 the number of...

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Network congestion has become more prevalent than ever. Broadband service subscribers are constantly experiencing jitter, latency, loss of connection, slow-surf, or even outright network...

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But now they start calling your helpdesk because the video is pixelated and they can’t download what they need. They run an Internet speed test and boom! They find out that they’re paying...

General Device Management

Keeping CPE evergreen is no easy task. With hundreds of different CPEs amongst thousands of subscribers, it’s challenging for operators to satisfy their customers’ expectations for...

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Quite frankly, your tools suggested the split, but because that tool knows nothing about usage from the subscribers on that node, you were not told how to optimally split the node. You were...

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As a provider, you want to chargeback those heavy users. You know that monetizing heavy over-usage of the network is a way for you to recoup the investments you make in order to keep ahead...

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Video requires a lot of data. And streaming means that this data must be downloaded in a timely manner. If the data cannot reach the subscriber in time, the video may stutter, become...

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The delegates attending this year’s Broadband World Forum (BBWF) in Amsterdam are no exception. Fittingly, so much of the change we see in our lives is driven by the convergence of...

General Network Analytics

With such high forecasts continuing into the next decade, service providers must ensure that their systems can keep up with the escalated bandwidth consumption required for OTT content....

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To improve customer satisfaction for your business, it’s important to understand what customers perceive as influences to QoE. From a recent Find Your Cloud report, customer QoE perception...

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The consumer demand for remote-enabled convenience, or “the connected home”, is also being expanded by the needs of medical professionals. As population and life expectancy increases,...

Events General

After record amounts of online viewing from IP-connected devices during major sports events in 2014, like the World Cup and Winter Olympic Games, the adoption of live-streaming is becoming...

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QoE is more than just service delivery performance. Customers will tell you that a great experience means:

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As legislators and consumer advocacy groups from all sides determine the future of broadband services — in light of growing bandwidth consumption and concerns over privacy — it’s important...

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How can you add value to your customers’ lives? It’s all about improving the user experience. Let’s break it down into three parts:

General DOCSIS

In very simple terms, 4K TV, also known as Ultra HD, delivers the resolution of 4 HD (1080p) TVs on a single screen. All content will be delivered over IP.

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Provide Timely Updates Take steps to continually update subscribers on the progress. Restoring service is the goal but the more information that you can provide, the better. This will help...

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HOT DOCSIS 3.1 We’ve already heard a lot about what to expect from this next-generation cable technology, with promises of data speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. The introduction of...

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To a degree, yes — but several other issues also deserve honourable mentions. Let’s start with TR-069. This protocol is instrumental for providers exploring connected home services. The...

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This is a handy feature for gamers who want to be on top of their profiles. But for service providers, this piggybacking could open up another front in the war for the HDMI 1, which is the...

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While it’s clear that increased video streaming is already affecting service providers, in the future, the connected home will create further issues. It won’t be long until it’s normal for...

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Today, flat screens come with two or more HDMI inputs — the industry’s response to the growing number of HDMI-enabled devices and HD content proliferating the market. This is certainly a...

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Now that the roles have been established, we can assign tasks. For the Backend, the tasks are relatively simple to summarize and are (nearly) universally accepted: Databases store...

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Before I begin, here is a bit of background for those unfamiliar with web applications. Web applications consist of three basic components:

Events General DDI

Smaller providers are also less likely to have implemented a strategy to combat the growth of OTT services. A quarter (25%) of respondents with fewer than 100,000 subscribers did not yet...

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The industry is in a dynamic period and the results of our recent survey, OTT Challenges and Opportunities, are largely positive. More than 95% of respondents recognize the strain that...

Best Practices General

The growing popularity of over-the-top (OTT) subscriber services such as streaming video, cloud-based applications, and video conferencing results in additional bandwidth demand. This...

General

1. The Cable Industry is Growing, Consolidating, and Diversifying

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Understand Your Resources In the 90s we had to keep our webpages slim to accommodate dial-up modem speeds. Today as the quality of content increases we must keep our bandwidth and...

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In software design, there is a field called user experience (UX) that’s dedicated to improving the overall experience a person has with a particular interactive system. At Incognito, we...

General DOCSIS

Theoretically, China’s unique CATV industry is organized in a four-layer hierarchical structure. First, there’s the nationwide network. Secondly, each of the country’s thirty-odd provinces...

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However, the cable industry is growing, fueled by the analog to digital transition, consolidation of players, use of service bundles, and increased “triple-play” penetration. These issues...

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Well, for larger MSOs, it means building data centers and selling internet-based services to commercial customers and residential subscribers. With the advent of the flexible office and a...

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At the end of the day, it’s about developing and forming a team that is able to come up with the next big idea. Peter Drucker said it the best: “Your greatest resource is your employees,”...

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2013 will also be the year where bandwidth monitoring tools will prove to be indispensable. These tools can leverage information provided by protocols like IPDR, SNMP, and sFLOW in order to...

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At Incognito, we do what we can to be socially responsible. I’m writing this not to be boastful, but to hopefully encourage others to chip in, at any level they can, in any way they see...

General DDI Device Management

1. OTT At top of the list is everything over-the-top (OTT) related, and specifically, how service providers can manage bandwidth with the growing abundance of OTT providers such as Netflix....

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The same goes for provisioning. You should buy your provisioning software the same way you would your apple pastries. There are hardware vendors out there that throw in “free” provisioning...

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This information between the customer device and your system can sometimes appear to be a big mess. One of the pillars on which I have built this company is the value of a strong API. At...

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Agility is another way of saying that you can react quickly to change and offer effective solutions to the challenges that your customers face. You need to be able to put yourself in your...

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1. The community working on the software How many people are working on the project? This is so important yet often overlooked. If the community is large, with hundreds of developers, then...

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Vendors have found success by building equipment that lets service providers carry billions of packets from point A to point B and anywhere in between. That’s all very well, but rigid...

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I started developing my own software for my customers (special releases at first). Then, I moved onto software that integrated Sun workstations with existing networks, providing a bridge...

Best Practices General

These days, there is a lot on a cable operator’s mind: the rising costs of programming, competition from Telco and Over-the-Top video, and the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. Time and...

General DDI

We are entering a world of the dual internet protocol. IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist and collaborate for a number of years. In fact, IPv4 may be with us for so many years that it may never...

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Standards are supposed to hold companies accountable! But the truth will always reveal itself.

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Fiber has been embraced in recent years and as any new trend, is quickly being deployed amongst the 2.2 million households in the city. The competition for subscribers is between the...

General Device Management

Whichever market you exist in as an operator, video as a monetized service has always been a manageable entity in the service delivery model to consumers. New Hybrid and IP gateways...