Rapid Modernization and Reduced Fraud

Championing the technology

Supporting modernization and the move to IPv6 was critical to the customer's roadmap, resulting in a careful evaluation of BCC's product capabilities and support experience. "As we were used to doing this in-house, we needed a high level of confidence in the technical capabilities and support skills of our provisioning vendor," explained the customer's principal engineer. "Unlike our existing DOCSIS solution and the other vendors, Incognito proved themselves with the features we needed out of the box, like streamlined MTA configuration at large scale, and their support team was very impressive. I quickly became the Incognito champion within our network engineering group, moving the BCC solution forward and advocating for its use."

The team also wanted reasonable assurance on the staying power of the solution. "The Incognito team demonstrated their commitment to our success, with a clear investment roadmap into product research and development and an unlimited licensing model that guarantees our access to major upgrades," said the principal engineer.

Improving security

With smarter consumers comes more sophisticated attempts by fraudsters looking to bypass access controls to steal service. In their latest survey, the Communications Fraud Control Association estimates over $3B USD in losses to subscription fraud and device/hardware reselling.

Service theft was top of mind for our customer and they looked to BCC to reduce the threat of revenue and reputational losses through cloned cable modems. Their principal engineer explains, "Subscribers want to trust our services as much as we want to protect our revenue, so Incognito's ability to support our anti-fraud efforts was a major differentiator. On top of the features built into DOCSIS, BCC gave us security benefits like dynamic file generation, MAC spoofing detection, and denial of service (DoS) prevention, plus reporting on potential rogue devices to help us make better decisions."

These features proved themselves after the cutover from their legacy system to BCC. "We did before and after reporting on our network and saw a massive 90% reduction in cloned modems thanks to Incognito," said the principal engineer. "This translates to significant risk reductions in revenue and reputation, as the number of potential fraud vectors was nearly eliminated."

Resolving a critical issue

Like most providers, this customer uses a high-availability (HA) architecture for their network, including DHCP deployment. Due to issues in configuration with their legacy process, there were problems synching IPv6 lease data between the DHCP server and network devices, causing issues with address renewals and re-assignment. "The database simply wouldn't synch leases with a number of devices, impacting the stability of our HA operations with subscribers. Once we moved to BCC's fully distributed DHCP deployment model, those issues went away, letting the system service leases without interruption."

Determined to build on their success with BCC, the customer now looks toward future innovations with the platform. "We're considering mapping of address and ports using translation (MAP-T) deployments to optimize our IPv4 and IPv6 network operations, among other initiatives. Incognito's unique product and licensing models will make this transition easier by lowering the technical and cost barriers to competitive evolution."