The following is the first in a three-part series of articles about WiFi in the cable environment contributed by Nokia.

Mobility is quickly becoming top of mind for cable operators today. As subscribers desire to connect, communicate and consume everywhere, mobility is now a strategic component that affects loyalty – and delivering a branded mobile experience as an extension of existing fixed services is a new frontier for cable operators.

It is estimated that WiFi usage accounts for about 80 percent of total mobile data consumption, and that 50 percent of that WiFi usage occurs in the home environment. Video has been a key driver for this uptake and it’s common to find seven or more connected, media-capable devices in a typical home today. As a result, people increasingly equate WiFi with the Internet and as more and more devices such as game consoles and TVs become WiFi-enabled, bandwidth demands on home WiFi networks are growing. Accordingly, subscriber expectations around the performance of home networks are increasing as well. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the numbers and types of connected devices and sensors will also multiply, adding to the complexity of the connected home environment.

Given these conditions, it’s no wonder cable operators need to understand and control the home WiFi experience. If it does not measure up to subscriber expectations, operators are off to a bad start with their branded WiFi service ambitions. This is not just about handling broadband demand or managing complexity; it’s about managing the overall customer experience.

What Subscribers Expect from Their Home WiFi Experience

The perceived WiFi user experience also depends largely on the type of service being delivered, such as voice, web browsing, or video, and will vary depending on the subscriber’s location in the home.

For example, subscribers often expect the following:

• Video streaming works flawlessly
• Internet browsing is quick and smooth
• Voice over WiFi service, if offered, is high quality
• Services perform equally well in differing locations around the house
• New devices are easy to configure and work properly

The reality with existing deployments, however, is that WiFi-related issues have become the number one technical support call driver for most cable operators, and a major source of customer dissatisfaction. Top issues include problems with wireless password, device setup, disconnects and (of course) performance. In fact, 70 percent of subscribers perceive that they have problems when streaming or performing downloads over WiFi

What is Causing the Problem?

As the home environment becomes more complex, it is increasingly more difficult for cable operators to get a clear view of the state of the home WiFi network or how the equipment, or environment, may have changed since initial deployment. Some of the network conditions that typically affect home WiFi experiences include:

• WiFi interference – impact of neighboring WiFi access points causing slow WiFi connections and/or drops

• Weak WiFi signals – meaning the received signal strength is below an acceptable threshold

• Unstable WiFi gateways – exhibiting an unusually large number of device reboots

• WiFi configuration – where sub-optimal settings for WiFi parameters have been identified

•Excessive memory/CPU usage – where the gateway is operating slower than it should

Most subscribers are not WiFi experts and do not know that if a neighbor is configured on an overlapping wireless channel it will slow down their network, or if they (or a neighbor for that matter) have a device older than 802.11b connected on the network it will have a slowing effect on other newer devices (802.11g/n) sharing the same network. As a result, most subscribers are unable to detect, diagnose and solve these common issues alone.

Additionally, many cable operators are blind to in-house issues without a technician on site. A better solution would be to remotely validate in-home connectivity of WiFi access points, such as residential gateways (RGW) or extenders, as well as the customer’s mobile and fixed devices. What is clear is that in order to deliver a branded WiFi service, cable operators need to ensure a great customer experience all the way to the end device itself.

How Cable Operators Can Take Control of the Experience

Cable operators today have a multi-vendor environment consisting of WiFi gateways, extenders and equipment with differing chip sets. Furthermore, each of these may have proprietary means of managing their specific part of the overall WiFi experience.

So what approach should cable operators take to cost effectively scale an end-to-end control of the home WiFi experience?

Analytics-based customer care and service assurance solutions are best equipped to meet these requirements as they leverage industry standards and employ common approaches to activating, configuring and troubleshooting across multi-vendor environments, while also providing rich information to customer service functions and other operator business processes.

Today’s customer experience management solutions perform data collection and analytics, coupled with workflow automation and end-to-end, service-level visibility to build a relevant picture of the home experience. Data collection is achieved for devices like residential gateways via standards such as TR-069 or Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). For mobile or tablet devices that do not support these standards, software clients can be installed to facilitate data collection.

The data analytics function is typically able to detect:

• Issues with frequencies, channels, signal propagation and RF interference
• Bad placement of a WiFi extender
• 802.11b device slowing down other devices
• An excessive number of devices
• Poor coverage/reception
• Frequent auto-channel hopping
• A high number of WiFi resets

This rich set of information can then be applied to generate recommendations and drive the cable operator assurance processes such as self care, assisted care, field tech support or even proactive care.

Self-care for example is a value added service that is becoming popular with subscribers. When correctly configured to work in tandem with the data analytics capabilities described above, self-care can not only resolve issues quickly, but also can avoid costly support calls or site visits while improving customer satisfaction with the service.

With self-care, the subscriber utilizes an operator-provided mobile application that may:

• Check to ensure the WiFi interface is enabled
• Check to see if the operator configured access point (SSID) is within reach of the device and connection is possible
• Verify Internet connectivity via this access point
• Estimate WiFi quality by determining issues from neighboring access points
• Report findings back to the data analytics function

Recommendations – such as the need for a WiFi extender or extender repositioning, the best channel to use or deciding whether to swap frequency bands (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) – can then be sent directly to the subscriber application or the operator call center.

In this article we have seen what subscribers expect from a branded experience, the typical issues encountered and how next-generation customer care solutions can handle the multi-vendor mix of new and existing WiFi deployments as the home environment evolves. In conclusion, it’s clear that delivering a branded home WiFi experience is within the grasp of cable operators and an important step in building customer loyalty.

In the next article, Nokia will discuss monetizing cable operator WiFi assets and examine some of the strategies cable operators can use to evolve initial WiFi deployments to drive new revenues and maximize their investment.