FTTH is not like any other network
If you are working in network engineering, hands-on with the routers and switches in the network, you probably have seen your fair share of network problems. However well you build it there is always some intermittent issue, some complaining user, some application that doesn’t get the throughput, some website that is unreachable.
It’s part of the everyday chaos of running a network to deal with big and small issues.
Fibre to the home networks are no different. Except that your network equipment isn’t just three stories down in the basement IT room, but spread out throughout the city and your users aren’t Maggie on 5th floor that can’t print or Harold on 3rd that can’t e-mail. Instead your users are Mr. Schmidt way over in Hauptdorf that gets a crappy TV-picture in the evening and Mrs. Wendt on Faststrasse who has problems with accessing her Internet bank.
Your Fibre to the home users aren’t your colleagues but your customers and they aren’t in your building where you can walk over to their computer and have a look yourself but have jobs of their own away from home, making troubleshooting during your working hours a real pain.
Troubleshooting becomes much more complex when the network becomes widespread and intermittent problems are the worst of them all. Add the non tech-savvy user to that and it can be frustrating at times.
Building the network is the easy part, running it is where it gets complicated and expensive. The more help your network can give you to find and resolve issues faster, the better. That is why easy operation is one of the key objectives we at Waystream have with every product we develop and every new release of our software that we let out to our customers. If we can make the switches a little bit smarter and save you a bunch of time then you can be more productive and your users more happy with your services.
Do you agree? What would be the smart feature you'd like to see to make your network operation even easier?