Less downtime thanks to custom monitoring software by Excentis

May 21, 2007 -- Ghent (Belgium) -- Excentis announces the success of custom-made monitoring and alerting software to help operators reduce the service downtime in their access networks. Thanks to the software, network and equipment failures can be detected, located and solved much faster than ever before.

 
Any cable operator understands the need to have a clear view of what’s going on in their networks. Cable modems can go down, amplifiers or head-end equipment can fail, fibres or coaxial cables can be broken. It isn’t sufficient to be able to detect that certain customers have connectivity problems, it is crucial that the source of the problem can be located as fast as possible. Often, this information is available in all kinds of network components, but in too many cases the existing monitoring software can simply not access the information because it is non-standard or too specific for a given customer.

Excentis can build upon a rich experience in problem solving and monitoring in real-life networks. This expertise is leveraged to develop intelligent, custom-made monitoring solutions that exactly meet the operator’s needs and use the available equipment’s possibilities and data sources to the full extent.

In the cable area for example, Dutch ISP ZeelandNet BV, subsidiary of DELTA NV, uses a EuroDOCSIS platform for providing internet and telephony services. “One of our main concerns was the difficulty to detect individual customers’ cable modems going off-line”, says Henk Steneker, Project Engineer Cable Signals at DELTA NV. With this in mind, Excentis has built a custom-made software platform to complement the existing monitoring software. Based upon knowledge of the location of the cable modems in the network, the system can find any malfunctioning EuroDOCSIS or coaxial network component up until amplifier and even tap level.

“We have run a trial for a couple of weeks, and now the system is operational. The Network Operations Center uses it during daytime, and the technical response team during night time”, Mr Steneker continues. “While some failures could formerly remain undetected for many hours, we can now immediately restore service. And that’s good news for our customers!”

 

For more information, please contact
David De Reu, Principal Engineer Consulting and Training at Excentis
Address: Gildestraat 8, 9000 Gent, Belgium | Phone: +32 9 269 22 91 | E-mail: david.dereu@excentis.com

About Excentis
Excentis (www.excentis.com), founded in May 2000, offers testing and consulting services, specialised training, and products for the telecom and ICT industry. Its consultancy ranges from architecture designs, audits and operational support to field problem solving. Excentis executes specific test programs on network components and acts as an independent company to perform certification testing for EuroDOCSIS and EuroPacketCable equipment on behalf of the European cable operators (EuroCableLabs). The Excentis Training Centre offers standard and custom made training programs on the most recent telecommunication technologies. Excentis also develops test and measurement products, like the ByteBlower TCP/IP traffic generator and analyser.

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