Alcatel-Lucent Digital Home Care Solution Customer Challenge, AT D O C O N S U M E R S W a N T ?

The Customer Challenge

When setting up triple-play services, you are naturally concerned about the many operational challenges. The growing complexity of home networks and the lack of knowledge of end users to manage and solve problems by themselves almost inevitably increases your burden. Furthermore, real-time services, such as video and voice, are highly sensitive to disruptions and quality issues in the access or home environment.

The early stages of triple-play service deployments have revealed that the lack of appropriate management solutions have frustrated both you and your end users. End users often experience great difficulties in their attempts to configure and activate home devices by themselves. Now, with the growing complexity of the home environment, the potential sources of problems have increased, ranging from simple software bugs and connectivity dis- ruptions to the trickier issues of configuration and setup compatibility.

Any of these problems could easily affect the conditions under which you deliver services to the consumer. Multiple service disruptions and poor service quality will frustrate your end users, resulting in a surge of help-desk calls, costly repair operations, dissatisfaction and churn. This translates into lost revenue and higher OPEX, diminishing the profitability of your triple- play service offering. Figure 1 illustrates the challenges in home management.

W H AT D O C O N S U M E R S W A N T ?

•Value-added services and content they can enjoy

•Services that work easily without requiring an understanding of complex technology issues

•Quality on par with, or even better than what they experienced before

•Services that work smoothly and providers who take care of making them work

W H AT R E A L I T Y D O YO U FA C E ?

•Accountability for service delivery, now highly dependent on the home environment

•Millions of home networks and home devices to support a broader range of services

•Customer expectation for the highest service quality – even for the most sensitive real-time services

•xDSL infrastructure, which is often stretched to its performance limits

Figure 1. A Broad View of Digital Home Management Challenges: Where Things Could Go Wrong

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X

X

Service Configuration

• Wrong service parameters

Home Network Configuration

•Wrong configuration

•Not suitable to service

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Line Qualification

•Unstable line

•Line not suitable for service

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X

Field Operations

•No problem location

•No reliable diagnostics

Customer Support Center

•No visibility of customer setting

•Lack of competence

Network Operations

•No proactive maintenance

•No visibility over line and home

•27 percent of users experienced home net- working problems – 31 percent of those called the SP. (Parks Customer Survey)

•30 percent of home networking devices are returned! (Wall Street Journal)

•70 percent of returned devices have No Defect Found (NDF). (North American ILEC)

•Over 25 percent of consumers would like to connect their TV and stereo to their home network. (TDG, Consumer Survey)

•We received an average of one call per subscriber during installation! (European ILEC on IPTV service launch)

Alcatel-Lucent Digital Home Care Solution 3