Introduction
Today, ETI Software supports 2.2 million Frontier Communications broadband subscribers across the nation. That relationship started in 2010 with one of the most complex telecom system integration projects in the telecommunications industry: converting nearly 200,000 former Verizon Telecom customers onto Frontier’s own platforms, under a tight deadline, with no room for service disruption. Throughout the duration of the partnership, Frontier has been reaquired by Verizon, now being known as Frontier, A Verizon Company.
Background
In July 2010, Frontier acquired from Verizon Telecom nearly 200,000 customers, approximately 8,000 staff members, and a complex array of legacy Verizon billing and back-office systems. Frontier agreed to lease those Verizon systems for only a short period to control costs, which meant they had a hard deadline to migrate everything, billing, provisioning, monitoring, and data services, onto their own communication systems.
The subscribers were spread across multiple states and supported by multiple FTTH technologies from different telecom vendors: Alcatel, Motorola, Tellabs, GenBand, Juniper, and SeaChange. On top of the fiber network infrastructure, Frontier also had to account for PSTN gateways, core service routers, VOD systems, and digital addressable control systems, each with its own proprietary API and integration requirements.
Challenge
Frontier faced a system integration challenge on multiple fronts. The first priority was solving the provisioning challenges of the Motorola Digital Addressable Controller (DAC), the system behind the set-top boxes, since it accounted for the largest percentage of daily provisioning events. For many service providers, the flow from a customer service request to actual delivery is a manual, multi-handoff process that runs from customer service through network operations. This “swivel chair” approach is labor-intensive, slow, and error-prone.
Building the integration solutions in-house wasn’t realistic given the timeline.
“The amount of work to build a system in-house to implement and manage this integration [with the DAC] along with all the other technologies, would have taken years, but we only had seven months,” said Jesse Ross, VIce President, Information Technology, Frontier. “We also knew that maintaining integrations to all these systems was going to be an ongoing challenge as we continue to roll out new services such as VoIP and cloud computing. It made sense to have a third party that can handle complex integrations and maintain them over the long haul.”
Ross also weighed the options between large framework-based vendors and smaller, more focused providers:
“Integration projects can be very difficult, time consuming and expensive. You can either do this work in-house, go with large companies with framework-based solutions, or go with a smaller company with an off-the-shelf product that while maybe not as customizable still gets the job done,” Ross said. “Big software firms are usually expensive. Licensing issues aside, the real, and often hidden cost is in the professional services required to write custom integrations within the product framework. These costs can easily skyrocket depending on the number of integrations involved or by how complicated they are to write.”
Solution
ETI’s Intelegrate Automate software had the majority of interfaces Frontier needed already built and available out of the box. That was a deciding factor.
“When we started talking with Frontier, they explained that the customers they were buying from Verizon were spread across several states and supported by myriad different technologies,” said Jeff Fraleigh, President, ETI Software.. “The huge selling point of our software is that it was already integrated and deployed with most of these [technologies] out of the box. The icing on the cake was that we were able to provide all the provisioning capabilities that Frontier needed through one application, which greatly simplified the architecture from what existed with Verizon’s in-house application suite.”
It required fewer than five meetings to get ETI up to speed with Frontier’s network configuration, understand the transition issues, and put a plan in place. ETI also trained Frontier staff to load, scrub, and verify much of the data themselves, which kept the project moving efficiently.
After the initial video and DAC conversion was complete, ETI brought data services online by extending flow-through provisioning across Frontier’s fiber optic network infrastructure, which spanned three FTTH technology platforms: Alcatel, Motorola, and Tellabs.
“Having three flavors of FTTH all under one roof isn’t a problem for Triad,” said Chris Beisner, ETI Vice President of Customer Success. . “When a Frontier customer calls in, no one has to touch anything. Triad talks to whatever EMS [element management system] is necessary, plus any related devices like the [GenBand] G6s and Juniper [service routers].”
“The night of the conversion went smoothly and the ability to manage customers’ video services transferred to Triad without issue,” said Ross.
“Working with a customer-focused company such as ETI allows us to reduce upfront costs. Plus, the quality of their custom software development is better,” Ross observed. “A bigger vendor’s software might have more features, but it definitely costs more to buy, plus it requires greater customization, and thus a bigger budget, than people expect. Large companies have less incentive to make customized changes, whereas ETI will evaluate a change request on its marketability and price its development accordingly.”
Results
Frontier’s partnership with ETI delivered measurable results across both the short and long term:
- Nearly 200,000 Verizon subscribers successfully converted onto Frontier’s systems on time and under budget
- An estimated $3.8 million in cost savings versus an in-house build (based on Ross’s estimate of 33 additional staff working six months at a loaded rate of $80/hour, including 20 people for software coding alone)
- Approximately 54,080 person-hours saved per year (about 18 full-time employees) in ongoing operational efficiency by automating end-user service management
- Field technicians gained remote access to manage device assignments, change services, and troubleshoot via proxy applications built on Triad’s APIs
- Billing “drift” between billing data and actual provisioned device state was reduced, recapturing lost revenue from delayed order completion and reducing customer billing errors
- A scalable model that lowered the cost of adding new subscribers. Ross estimated Frontier would need only 5 new hires instead of 15 to support an additional 100,000 subscribers
“We have a sustainable model now that we’ve all but eliminated manual provisioning from our service operations,” said Ross. “Before, if we added 100,000 subscribers, our cost to service them would go up because we’d need to hire more people to support the additional customers. Today if the same scenario occurred, we would have to hire only five people instead of 15 thanks to our automated processes.”
For Frontier, the decision came down to time-to-market and low risk. ETI had the right tools already built, the extensive experience to handle complex integrations across multiple telecom vendors, and the professional services model to deliver on a timeline that an in-house build couldn’t match.
