Device Management

Top Issues for MSOs: Device Management

By Incognito on August, 15 2013

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While monitoring technologies will help you understand how today’s average household uses devices for social interaction, work, and entertainment, provisioning these devices is more complex. With multi-standard devices becoming the norm, firmware and configuration files are more difficult to manage and administer than ever before.

On top of dealing with regional requirements and service-specific needs, you also often need to provision multiple devices from a wide range of vendors. Unfortunately, many vendors have developed their own methods to configure specialized SIP and TR-069 devices. As a result, you can be stuck with devices that have similar capabilities but are configured completely differently. The only real option in this scenario is to ensure that your device provisioning solution supports a variety of standards and network types. When choosing a solution, consider the following three factors:

  1. Customizability

  2. Flexibility

  3. Expandability for future requirements

Customizability

The cable industry is rapidly changing and service providers who want to stay ahead of the game need vendors that provide customizable and agile solutions. In an ideal world, you should never have to wait months for a vendor to add support for a new device or service. Choosing a solution provider who is willing to cater to your unique requirements and quickly deliver changes and updates is just as important as checking off your feature requirement list.

Flexibility

In the same vein, your device provisioning solution shouldn’t limit your business operations. A good solution should come out-of-the-box with support for a variety of device types, vendor proprietary implementations, and access networks to reliably provision and deploy devices to your customers. Your solution should be able to provision static files and dynamically generate configuration files correctly so that you can choose the model that best fits your business.

From the device management perspective, a provisioning solution should be able to group devices based on operator-defined requirements, such as service level and device type, and enable batch firmware upgrades and parameter changes to devices matching this criteria.

Expandability

To ensure a sound long term investment, the solution of choice should be expandable for any future growth and requirements. In the long run, the push to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) through triple and quad-play services will inevitably increase the number of devices that needs to be managed. Look for a device provisioning solution that supports an increasing number of devices without sacrificing performance. While it is difficult to ascertain whether or not a vendor will quickly adopt key industry standards, at the minimum, current standards such as TR-069, DOCSIS 3.0, PacketCable 2.0, SIP, and IPv6 dual-stack must be supported.

Here at Incognito, we have developed a device management solution that keeps all these factors in mind. Find out more by reading about our solution here.

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