Broadband Bunch Podcast Recap
Preseem CEO Dan Siemon recently joined the Broadband Bunch podcast with host Pete Pizzutillo to chat about (among other topics) how our platform can help regional ISPs proactively improve network operations and support as a way to survive and thrive against Tier 1 competitors. We’ve pulled out six key takeaways from their conversation below—feel free to listen to the full episode here.
Get to the Root Cause of Network Issues
To begin, Dan spoke about Preseem’s evolution from a traffic shaping and Quality of Experience (QoE) tool to a unified platform that integrates directly with APs, CPE Radios, ONTs, and OLTs to pull fixed wireless and fiber metrics from multiple vendors. When these are tied in with the QoE data and topology information that Preseem also collects, ISPs can then identify what’s causing network issues, not just that issues exist.
As Dan explained, “the combination of all that together is that we’re now becoming a layer across the access network that gives one spot for a network operations team to get a sense of what’s happening across their entire access network, and for the support team to get a picture of what’s happening, without having to understand the tools from every single vendor. That’s a huge training burden on support teams.”
“And then on the exec side, having one place to look for ‘How many subscribers do I have in my system,’ how many people are on a 500 Mbps plan on Tarana, answering questions like that, because we have it all in one place.”
Accelerate Support Team Productivity
As an example of the impact Preseem can have on support teams, Dan mentioned a large customer that operates a multi-vendor fiber and fixed wireless network. That company is Herotel, a South African ISP with more than 200,000 subscribers and 100 support agents.
Before implementing Preseem, their support team faced a steep learning curve. New hires had to learn each vendor’s system, multiple internal billing systems, and the technical details of both fiber and fixed wireless technologies. The journey from hiring to being able to take support calls productively took eight weeks. After deploying Preseem, that timeline dropped to three weeks, a 50%-plus reduction.
“It comes down to, they just didn’t have to learn as much,” said Dan. “They didn’t have to learn quite as much about fixed wireless or fiber, they didn’t have to learn each vendor’s tools, they were just able to ramp up faster.”
Read the full Herotel success story here to learn how they’ve also cut time spent on processing support tickets from up to half an hour down to 5-10 minutes.
Maintain Your Network Proactively
Pete and Dan also spoke about the benefits of proactive network maintenance, or the ability to see where your network issues are so that you can fix them before customers start calling.
Dan advised ISPs to “find something that can tell you where the problems are either at the traffic level, like we do in the QoE metrics, or things like we do with our RF scores, for example, telling you which particular radios are the ones that have the worst RF conditions and the heaviest users. (This tells you) ‘Go fix those today,’ they’re going to be the ones that are going to make the biggest impact on improving the network, to drive support calls down.”
By focusing effort where it’ll have the biggest impact, operators create a virtuous cycle. The network improves, support calls decrease, and the team has more time to continue proactive optimization rather than fighting fires.
As Dan said during the podcast, “If you don’t get ahead of problems, you’re just going to be chasing them forever.”
Measure What Matters for Quality of Experience
Speaking of metrics, Dan spoke about the importance of latency measurements as a reliable indicator of QoE for your subscribers.
“If latency’s going up a lot, that means that almost certainly there’s somewhere in the path that the link is overloaded in some way, so it’s starting to buffer. If you don’t see that, it’s a very good sign that the network’s healthy. It really does turn out to be very indicative of general quality across the network,” Dan said.
How to Reduce Latency for ISPs and Subscribers
Level the Vendor Playing Field
Regional ISPs often operate multi-vendor networks, mixing equipment from different manufacturers based on what works best for specific deployment scenarios or what became available as the network evolved. This creates an operational challenge: how do you compare performance across fundamentally different systems that report metrics in different ways?
Preseem addresses this by normalizing metrics internally, Dan explained. The platform synthesizes common measurements, such as link rate, from the data each vendor provides. This creates a baseline that can be compared across different vendors and even different equipment types from the same vendor.
Once you have that common foundation, meaningful analytics become possible. You can score equipment performance over time. More importantly, you can compare equipment against each other to identify outliers.
For example, “we’ll build a model across all our customers of what a Rocket 5AC is capable of, and we’ll use that as a comparison so our customers know whether their individual installation of that radio is in good health or not, and that allows them to drive proactivity,” Dan said. “There’s no single operator that would see as many of a single instance of an access point as we do to build that kind of model internally.”
Amplify Your Engineering Expertise
It’s important to note that scoring and benchmarking capabilities of a platform like Preseem don’t replace RF engineering expertise, they actually amplify it. Deep technical knowledge remains invaluable for diagnosing and solving complex network problems.
However, “what we can avoid is you having to go to a thousand APs individually and see which ones have bad RF and then, once you find one, deal with it. We’re able to score against all of them and say, ‘Here’s your ten worst, look at those every Monday,’” Dan said.
“In general, that’s going to give you a list of where you want to spend your time. And that’s really where the efficiency comes. The expertise is still required in the end to solve the problem, but it’s that grunt work finding where you’re going to go put your effort that we can really help a lot with.”
With Preseem, regional ISPs get enterprise-grade network intelligence without enterprise-scale budgets. Combined with the inherent advantages regional providers have, such as closer relationships with customers, faster decision-making, and deeper community connections, this creates a genuine opportunity to deliver superior service.
