Iskratel provides the solution for an efficient way of managing subscribers’ devices, like Home Gateways, Set-Top Boxes, VoIP phones, mobile devices, and the services running on them.
The amount and complexity of CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) devices in an end customer’s home network has increased a lot over the past years. Similarly, in mobile networks, subscribers use a lot of brands and models of different devices. There is a big challenge for service providers to manage and control all these devices and the services running on them remotely from the central office (CO). With such help, fixed and mobile subscribers are getting a much better customer experience, using many new and frequently deployed services in fast-developing networks. The Iskratel Remote Device Management solution covers the management of services running on both fixed and mobile devices.
Benefits
The Iskratel Remote Device Management solution helps service providers by:
- Decreasing inventory-handling expenses:
- Helps to reduce the number of repair transactions (unnecessary device return)
- Automatic installation of appropriate SW version to devices
- Increasing the service provider’s revenue:
- Helps to present offers and educate customers about new services
- Makes it easier to successfully deliver and configure new applications and services
- Helps subscribers to use and get support for complex services
- Increases customer satisfaction
- Decreasing customer-support expenses:
- Avoid unnecessary calls to the service provider’s help desk
- Shorten help-desk call-handling times
- Reduce churn
The Iskratel Remote Device Management solution consists of two parts.
The first, CPE management part, covering fixed networks, is based on the Broadband Forum's TR-069 specification. This is quite a new specification, supported by the majority of manufacturers of modern CPE devices, which gives carriers an opportunity to efficiently manage home gateways and even the other devices in a subscriber’s home network (e.g., SIP phones, VoIP adapters, STB, NAS). It is based on a flexible platform that makes it possible to also manage CPE devices that do not support TR-069 or SNMP, which are supported out-of-the-box. In this way the system covers practically all the CPE models on the market. Together with great scalability (support up to many millions of devices), it is a powerful tool for any service provider.
The mobile-network devices are managed by another, mobile part of the Iskratel Remote Device Management solution, using OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) specifications. It supports major smart-phone mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/RIM, Palm, Symbian) on the market. Even more important is the fact that the integrated solution helps to manage the end-to-end mobile service and not just the mobile device.
Main features of the solution
- Automatic CPE activation and inventory
- Both single-device management and bulk operations
- Firmware-image management
- Configuration backup and restore
- Service provisioning
- Fault and performance monitoring
- Diagnostics and alarming
- Reporting and analytics
- Additional easy-to-use tools (self-care portal, call-center application)
- Both TR-069 and SNMP support and other protocols (CLI) via plug-in
- OMA support for mobile devices
- Northbound interface easy for OSS/BSS integration
- Wholesale model support
- Telco-grade security, scalability and high availability