A few weeks back, we discussed some new software being shown by Pure Networks — their Network Magic platform. To reiterate what we said then — we were wowed by the concept, which provided an easy-to-use interface on top of a home network config and monitoring utility. In these days of ever-decreasing service margins, it is absolutely essential that broadband providers stop thinking of their demarc point being the side of the house, or the Ethernet output of a gateway, and start thinking about how they can get a piece of the whole home pie.
This requirement only solidifies as providers start to offer the two non-data legs of the triple play — voice and video. Getting, for example, voice-over-IP (VoIP) signals to the gateway with some sort of quality of service (QoS) is only half the battle — completing phone calls to all outlets and handsets in the home is the rest. Video is much the same — if the TV upstairs doesn’t work properly because of home networking issues, then the IPTV service really isn’t worth a darn.
Now some (maybe even most) carriers understand this, but they simply can’t get their hands and minds wrapped around a business case for explicitly supporting and monitoring home networks, and extending their demarc to the end points within a home. To which we say: Look, we build business cases for many different platforms for many different carriers, and the bottom line is this — you need to consider all costs and all opportunities before you dismiss something that might cost you a few bucks to implement.
If a carrier looks at the true costs of its broadband services, it will see that it’s already paying (and probably paying big) for home networking support. Folks we talk with in the support industry tell us something that is probably fairly obvious — a large chunk of calls for support of broadband relates to PCs, wireless cards and home routers, and not to the central-office-to-modem side of the broadband connection. So broadband providers are already spending money supporting home networks — even if it’s just to say “not our problem,” it costs them money to answer the calls.
Which brings us back around to the concept of a home network management/monitoring platform and interface. What Pure Networks showed at CES in January seems to be snowballing into something bigger and more widely available across the market. We’ve had other vendors with similar retail-focused solutions track us down and show us their products (more on that in a future column). We’ve also seen solutions that were much more explicitly carrier-centric — such as Netopia’s just announced Visibility platform.
Available in both business and consumer variants, Visibility provides a centralized and automated management system for carriers to control and configure CPE gateways (a tool that carriers of all sorts are demanding, of course) and also provides — you guessed it — visibility into the home network itself.
With Visibility in place, a carrier can see a graphically-rich “map” of the entire home network, including end points such as printers, PCs, IP video cameras, VoIP terminals and video set top boxes. The carrier can also use this view to remotely access HTML config pages and actively configure, troubleshoot or even update firmware for networked devices. All of this is in addition to being able to remotely configure settings such as firewall, wireless security and QoS on the Netopia gateway.
Netopia is focusing this product as a carrier-based tool — as a means of reducing those customer service call time lengths and of more rapidly troubleshooting in-the-home network issues. They are not — yet — focusing this on a more “service” oriented angle — using the interface and capabilities to help a carrier offer a home networking service that actually adds value to the customer (as opposed to today’s “drop ship a router and be done with it” approach) — but there’s every reason to hope that some enlightened carriers look at the business case and use this solution (or one like it) to begin offering an IP-savvy “inside wiring” plan to their customers.
