Why Roll a Truck? Just Ask the CPE Instead

While CPE polling has been around for a while, the pre-equalization revolution and full band capture modems are making headway into giving operators valuable and actionable data about the health of the network and the ability to utilize it.The future, however, looks even brighter. Increased processing power is allowing the CPE and the test and measurement worlds to converge. In this new ecosystem, field meter functionality, for example, could be migrated into the CPE, said Jim Walsh, product line manager for JDSU at Expo last week."This will allow (operators) to replace truck rolls with CPE polls," Walsh said during the presentation of the paper, "The Full (Band) Story: How Smart CPE Will Change HFC Maintenance Forever."Historically, if a customer reported video tiling, the operator could poll the set-top box to see MER and certain other characteristics of the signal. If the problem were more complicated, a truck would be rolled solely to get a technician in the house with a meter to determine whether it were plant-based. With the smart CPE Walsh spoke about, there already would be a meter inside the house because the capabilities would be inside the CPE."(You get) a virtual truck roll by polling the customer's modem," Walsh said, noting that customer service gets a nod because the subscriber doesn't have to stay at home to wait for the technician to get inside to perform a simple task.The value of smart CPE can be realized without 100% penetration. Walsh looked to work done a few years ago related to a downstream monitoring device. It would have had similar test and measurement capabilities to the smart CPE, but would be physically placed around the outside plant. The determination was made that there would need to be five to 10 of these devices per node (between 300 and 500 subscribers)."That is a very small number relative to subscribers to be effective .... Those downstream monitors would be placed precisely, where the smart CPE would (appear) randomly, but as a general rule of thumb, once you have 10%, you have enough coverage," Walsh said, noting that 20% would be even better.One barrier to CPE polling in general has always been the bandwidth it requires. The increasing number of upstream carriers could lead to a "big data" avalanche - with too much information to pull across the pipe and sift out on the back end. With smart CPE, however, the device will do more of the processing. The CPE will transmit only actionable data."(CPE) will look at the network on its own and send back notifications telling the MSO something is wrong," Walsh said.Monta Monaco Hernon is a free-lance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].