Community Broadband At Its Best

The Story of Wilson, NC and ETI Software

In 2008, The City of Wilson created Greenlight, its own fiber network to boost economic development and provide affordable cutting edge triple play services to its residents. Greenlight’s challenge was multi-faceted: plan, operate and grow its network and revenue stream in the most efficient, customer-centric manner possible.

As the network was built and operations began, the number one priority was to prioritize record-keeping and maintain efficiency. “Proactive service is the key to keeping customers happy and to running a network efficiently and profitably,” said Will Aycock, General Manager, Greenlight Community Broadband/City of Wilson. “ETI has guided our FTTH network expansion, increased efficiency across all business units, and improved customer service satisfaction – helping us consistently maintain a churn rate of less than 2 percent. It’s been a game-changer for us.”

Today, Greenlight is thriving and enjoys a superior reputation for customer service and efficiency. Operating costs have dropped, churn reduced and all departments are proactively managed and monetized.

The following four scenarios describe how Greenlight implemented ETI’s broadband and service management platform, specifically Vision FMS, Vision OSS, Vision BSS and Vision Analytics to streamline processes and reduce operating expenses.

I. Monitoring Daily Work Order Status and Vehicle Tracking

Challenge: 

Greenlight needed a simple, thorough way to monitor all daily work orders to make it easier to group field service calls geographically.  This would allow them to reduce truck rolls and fuel costs, and dispatch field techs by region for improved response times.  The real-time data would allow them to know instantly when daily service calls were on schedule by region and would permit them to better manage the customer expectations.

Solution:

Integrate all work order types and service vehicle tracking into a web-enabled, map view of ETI to show daily, real-time status of all their footprint’s service calls.

ETI Results:

Integrating all service call types and vehicle tracking data into the map interface allowed Greenlight to:

• Track the location of all daily service calls, their type, their status and service vehicles location.
• Group open service calls by region, thus greatly reducing travel times and fuel costs.
• Have better on-site response times by dispatching nearby crews to local problem priorities.
• Identify past due and repeat service calls and prioritize to the nearest field crew.
• The total service calls each month experienced a 20% reduction in unnecessary truck rolls.
• Improve the customer’s experience with better response times.

II.  Inventory Management and Device Reclamation

Challenge:

Devise a system that alerts Greenlight when field equipment (splitters, cabinet hardware, ONTs, STBs) needs to be reclaimed or when reaching capacity.  Cables, splitters, LT cards, ONTs and STBs are costly equipment to purchase regularly.  Greenlight wanted an intelligent system to tell them when to reclaim unused equipment in the field for reuse in place of frequent new inventory purchases.

Solution:

Use ETI to monitor field equipment capacity levels necessary to minimize the purchase of new equipment.  Use weekly/monthly reports to reveal potential equipment that could be reclaimed from the field.  All information is displayed in a map view.

Result:

Tracking all field equipment and inventory within ETI map view allowed Greenlight to see all devices to reclaim and track capacity levels of each hub cabinet.  Greenlight averages over 2,400 deployed ONTs annually that require the support of numerous LT cards and splitter cords.  By following an aggressive reclamation policy, ETI drastically reduced equipment purchases resulting in hundreds of thousands of avoided costs in over a two-year period.

III. Tracking Sales and Marketing Campaigns

Challenge:

Implement an intelligent system to easily monitor and track sales by service, product and geographic region.  Greenlight wanted to display all the data in a map view that will allow them to track sales per customer or region, track current marketing campaign results and allow for daily/weekly/monthly reporting to help them improve their customer facing strategies.

Solution:
Utilize ETI to display all subscribers and the services tied to their accounts all within a map view to analyze the data geographically and track sales trends per neighborhood, city and region.

Result:

Using the ETI map interface Greenlight was able to display and track all existing customers locations, any service or product currently on their account and all other potential customers within their footprint.  This allowed them to identify sales patterns to capitalize on trends in certain areas while highlighting underperforming areas and their current marketing strategies to improve them.  They were better able to track their internal sales quota fulfillments to match their installs and service calls to more efficiently schedule their workers.  Most importantly, it also gave them the ability to track average revenue per user (ARPU) to show minimum penetration areas that don’t meet their revenue goals.

IV.  Network Monitoring and Storm Response

Challenge:

Allow Greenlight to manage their entire fiber network through a single map interface.  Included in this interface? The ability to see network alarms, signal degradations, any fiber cuts and current status of all ONT devices across the network.  A proper response process was also needed for outages caused by extreme weather and storms.

Solution: 

Track all fiber network elements within ETI to instantly show the health of any part of the network in real-time so that Greenlight could shorten response times for signal issues and outages.

Result:

ETI was initially used as daily monitoring tool in the Greenlight NOC.  As NOC personnel track multiple alarm types they can instantly respond to clear them or research the issue, prioritize it and dispatch a nearby field technician to resolve the issue.   On numerous occasions, issues were identified and resolved before any customer awareness.  An unexpected benefit was they were better able to diagnose all network activity issues and reduce truck rolls by more than 10% annually.  This also allowed them a more organized dispatch approach for field crews after storm outages.  Receiving many customer calls during and after the storm, the Greenlight NOC could focus on the most affected areas and could more efficiently serve every customer affected by the outage.