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The exponential growth of demand for bandwidth, amid the development of high-bandwidth uses such as HD, ultra HD and 3D video, has led to the rapid development of FTTH/B.
Ovum forecasts that the number of FTTH/B users will reach 231.66 million, with a CAGR of 14% to the end of 2018. At the same time, ONT efficient maintenance is becoming one of the key issues that operators and ordinary users are facing.
ONT operation and maintenance is closely related to its network characteristics. Compared to traditional broadband networks, FTTH network has its special characteristics such as being long-distance, subscriber line sensitive, and complex.
Today, the operators’ existing IT systems can support the FTTH business to automatically activate and open, but these configurations are mainly for the central office equipment. For terminal equipment, installation personnel still need to perform the opening and maintenance.
In this situation, the following problems will likely happen. First is low efficiency in opening devices. Maintenance staff needs to borrow a PC from the host or own a portable computer, which is not very convenient.
Additionally, the staff needs to connect the PC to the gateway and then make some configurations to the gateway according to some specific pages. They also need to see a specific page to confirm the successful opening and, in case of speed testing, they need to access specific URLs through a PC or install a specific speed-testing software.
Second is poor user experience and high complaint rate. This may be due to the long opening period and the need to take the host's computer, taking too much time to solve the device problem, subscriber’s lack of some self-service means to solve the problem, and so on.
Third is the high cost of equipment maintenance. When users encounter problems like no internet access, IPTV blocking and other kinds of issues, maintenance staff usually cannot remotely and accurately determine the cause of the problem.
Worse, they don’t have a powerful tool for support and have to rely on experience that may not be helpful in solving the problem on the spot. They usually need all related network nodes operators to jointly discuss the solution, which leads to high equipment maintenance costs.
To address these challenges, FiberHome developed pioneering ONT operation and maintenance kits.
These include the Maintenance Assistant (MA), a mobile phone application through which maintenance staff can completely customize and open the gateway easily. The MA can also do key speed testing and one-key diagnostics, as well as explore all records of opening, operation and maintenance.
There is also the service assistant mobile app, which allows the user to view the gateway status, run the services and make some self-diagnosis. When faced with service failure, the subscriber can locate the problem and perform a certain degree of fault recovery operations, and don’t need to wait for maintenance staff’s visit.
And then there is the ONT forewarning module. Through its data reporting and diagnostics functions, operators can effectively reduce door-to-door maintenance times and save on manual maintenance costs.
The FiberHome ONT maintenance solution has been used commercially in some provinces of China Telecom. The solution effectively enhanced the efficiency of maintenance, and also played an important role in fault location.
China Telecom has incorporated the relevant functions into the latest terminal specifications, as uniform requirements for the procurement of CPE equipment.
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