Network Metrics to Track by Team

Network Metrics: The Challenge

Due to budget or staff size restrictions, regional fixed wireless, fiber, and hybrid ISPs are often stuck taking a reactive approach to network and subscriber management. This means dealing with multiple vendor systems and piecing together data from a variety of sources just to see how the network is performing.

As a result, network management, growth, and the customer experience all suffer. That means an increased churn risk, more support calls and longer resolution times, and a lack of clarity on which areas of the network need investment.

With access to actionable network metrics and subscriber intelligence in a single platform, however, regional ISPs can start moving from reactive to proactive network management. This, in turn, leads to improved efficiency, reduced support calls and churn, and an increase in revenue and reputation. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key network metrics for ISP teams to track.

Network Operations

Network ops teams are an ISP’s heartbeat, handling everything from network maintenance, scalability, and upgrades to resource allocation, technical support, and complex integrations with various systems.

They’re the team that manages the access network elements, including Access Points (APs) and CPE Radios on fixed wireless networks, and OLTs and ONTs on fiber networks. This team also includes people with access technology-specific expertise, such as RF/AP experts for fixed wireless.

That’s a lot! Here at Preseem, we understand the weight of this workload and provide important network metrics to help your ops teams minimize downtime, ensure reliability, and proactively monitor network health.

Fixed Wireless: Access Points & CPE Radios

Preseem provides a common interface for viewing and investigating APs and CPE Radios across vendors and models. Key metrics are normalized across vendors and collected at one-minute intervals.

Because everything is in one place, ISPs can reduce training and vendor-specific expertise requirements for network (and support) staff, while empowering your team to answer questions and investigate customer problems without needing access to or learning vendor tools. Here’s a sample of what’s available:

• AP Health Score: This enables your network operations team to identify the APs that are delivering a poor experience across several dimensions with a single, sortable score that can be used to prioritize work.
• AP and CPE Radio RF Score: With these scores, technicians can identify the APs and CPEs with poor RF conditions across many dimensions that can be used to prioritize proactive network improvements. It also reduces the expertise required to identify APs with poor RF and makes existing RF experts more efficient. This way, they can spend more time fixing problems and less time looking for them!
• AP Subscriber Capacity: Our data modelling and analysis converts complicated airtime and usage partners into a simple count of the number of subscribers the AP can handle. Using this you can target equipment investment to the areas that need capacity the most, not areas where new customers can already be supported.
• CPE Business Value Score: This score identifies the CPE Radios with the biggest negative impact on airtime. Many dimensions are simplified down to a single score that can be used to prioritize improvements that enable your ISP to sell larger plans and support more subscribers per AP.

Fiber: OLTs, PONs, and ONTs

• Loaded Tx/Rx: These metrics allow you to understand and compare the throughput of your OLTs during the times of the day with the highest demand.
• Min OLT and ONT Rx Power: These metrics show the 5th percentile lowest receive power level at OLTs and ONTs, respectively, to help find PONs with relatively higher attenuation. As a result, your team can easily Identify PONs across vendors that are near failure to avoid outages.
• Rx Power Warnings: This displays the number of ONTs that have a warning or error level for the received power level so that you can more easily identify PONs with significant attenuation issues.
• Loaded Latency: Unique to Preseem, this metric helps you understand and compare the latency experienced by subscribers on each of your OLTs during the times of the day with the highest demand.

Customer Support

If the Network Operations team is your ISP’s heartbeat, then the Customer Support team are your eyes, ears, and voice. They’re on the frontline talking and listening to subscribers, troubleshooting and problem-solving, and maintaining high levels of customer service even during the busiest or most stressful times.

Here are some of the real-time metrics they can monitor in Preseem to ensure efficiency, reduce support resolution times, and improve customer satisfaction.

• QoE Measurements Tied to the Network Topology: The Customer Support team can quickly get to the root cause of issues, and identify whether problems are network-wide or in-home, with actionable metrics that encourage proactive investment in the network. Bonus: Your network operations team can also use these metrics to identify issues such as overloaded APs and backhauls, bad optical cables, or poorly-performing APs.
• High-Granularity Subscriber Traffic-Based QoE Metrics: These metrics show a near-real-time view into subscriber and network behavior down to the individual subscribers and IP addresses to make troubleshooting faster, without adding traffic to the network.
• AP and CPE Radio Diagnostics: These show common root causes of poor AP and CPE Radio performance and expose them as simple, textual descriptions. This empowers less technical staff to understand where the problem is and the likely cause. It also saves time that could be wasted investigating down the wrong path (e.g. looking at the subscriber’s home when the problem is the RF link), and helps avoid unnecessary escalations to the network operations team.

Sales and Marketing

Some of the metrics already mentioned above can also be used by your growth and revenue teams. For example, AP Subscriber Capacity is not only useful for network operations but can be used by your sales and marketing teams to target their efforts to areas and neighborhoods where capacity is available. This makes better use of your ad and promo spend while reducing any internal tension about where to direct your expansion efforts.

Similarly, the Business Value score can be used to prioritize improvements that enable your ISP to sell larger plans. On that note, your growth team can also use Preseem’s Accounts, Services, and Packages views to see data usage (throughput and tonnage) for each Account and Service as collected both from the network elements and the Preseem inline element, and easily compare throughput to the Service’s set rate.

How it works: Preseem synchronizes with systems of record such as BSS/OSS systems, CRM systems, and EPC systems, to import information about accounts, services, and packages. Preseem ties this customer data together with the topology information learned from the network and provides a simple user interface to navigate this data model. Your sales and marketing teams can then use this to find upsell opportunities for customers regularly maxing out their plan rate.

Ready to try the data-based, proactive approach? Take a Product Tour or book a live demo with us today to learn more about how Preseem can benefit your ISP. Also, make sure to download our free Fixed Wireless Network Report for exclusive insights and network metrics across equipment and vendors.