What most Triple Play customers want today is fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). What most providers are delivering is fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) and paired copper conductors to the house. It makes sense to get into FTTH after you have captured the brownfield customer, and when you are involved in greenfield construction.

So if you are an FTTN company, every day when you wake up, think about the valuable first mile of copper -- it must be in stellar condition. What does stellar condition mean? It means that all pairs must be clean with good longitudinal balance within the reach of all 3 services. Customers put up with a lot on the PSTN dial-tone side of the house, and will tolerate (barely) slow Internet speeds, but let that TV pixelize or freeze for an instant and that customer will call in a trouble report.

When a customer has a problem that affects The Triple Play, 48% of the complaints should not be dispatched to the field. There are a myriad of problems that affect the services from provisioning, profiling, paths, software upgrades, DSLAMs (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) exceeding the reach, and so on, that should not be dispatched out.

Of the problems that are dispatched out, 32% are found in the house and 18.6% are cable troubles. If the root cause isn't immediately identified and rectified, the customer is pushed off to the field technician.

With an average of 62% of all Triple Play customer complaints dispatched to the field, the 11% that should not have been dispatched raises havoc in the field, creating multiple dispatches plus customer and technician frustration. Frustration is even higher in the large RBOCS that utilize both installation repair technicians and cable repair technicians.

The first dispatch is to the installation repair technician that looks for sync and rate at the network interface. If sync and rate is unacceptable a pair change is in order, or dump it to cable maintenance.

With acceptable sync and rate, the repair tech must qualify the inside wire, jacks, base cords, modems, and set-top boxes. If all passes, dump it to cable repair techs. Eventually the 11% of unnecessary dispatches ends up back at the DSLAM end where it belonged in the first place.

Unnecessary dispatch out is expensive and ends up with preventable customer- and field-technician-frustration.

What's your experience? Are you dispatched out when you shouldn't be? We want to hear your observations and possible solutions.

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