Cisco Cisco Prime Home 2.4 Information Guide
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Customer Case Study
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Customer Name: Consolidated Communications
®
Industry: Service Provider
Location: Illinois, USA (headquarters)
Number of Employees: Approximately 1700
CHALLENGE
●
Simplify management of 100,000 DSL
residential gateways already deployed
●
Reduce overall operating expenses while
improving customer satisfaction
SOLUTION
●
Deployed remote management solution for
visibility into the home network
●
Automated configuration and analysis of home
gateway devices and customizable device
interaction
interaction
●
Created intelligent reports to facilitate
migrations, upgrades, and asset management
RESULTS
●
Fast, easy troubleshooting and bulk
management, in one case avoiding US$30,000
in outage costs
in outage costs
●
Automated, faster, and more frequent device
upgrades with savings of 80-100 hours per
upgrade
upgrade
●
Time to on-board new gateway vendor models
cut in half
Solving the Home Network Management Challenge
Consolidated Communications saves money and time with streamlined device
management and customer support tools.
management and customer support tools.
Challenge
Consolidated Communications is one of the largest independent
local telephone companies in the United States, providing advanced
communications services to residential and business customers in
California, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The
company offers a wide range of services, including IP-based digital
and high-definition television, high-speed Internet, voice over IP,
carrier access, directory publishing, and local and long-distance
service.
Consolidated High-Speed Internet service includes a digital
subscriber line (DSL) Internet service, and the company provides
free home networking equipment to all of their residential customers.
The company sought to improve the overall manageability and
supportability of the approximately 100,000 DSL residential
gateways in customers’ homes. Consolidated has six different
gateway models in service, each of which is configured differently
and can connect to multiple Internet-capable TVs, laptops, gaming
consoles, smartphones, Internet cameras, and other networked
devices.
Standard tasks such as updating device configurations (Wi-Fi, port forwards, and more) as well as firmware
across the six different gateway models were consuming an inordinate amount of developer time and required a
skilled technician to perform them. For each gateway type, a developer would need to manually push specialized
commands to upgrade it or make a device configuration or firmware change, an extremely manual and time-
consuming process.
Consolidated relied on an internal system that automatically logs into all of the company’s residential gateways but
provides no visibility into any devices that lay behind that gateway. For the support agent, even determining the
manufacturer and model of the home gateway that Consolidated provided to the customer was not a simple task.
Consolidated needed better tools to help it more easily troubleshoot issues in the home network.