Vice President of Solution Architectures at CCI Systems, Todd Gingrass, discusses how providers and operators address upstream bandwidth. Upstream bandwidth has continued to be a big focus for more than a year now. Those networks who require more bandwidth continue to be a very relevant topic today. The good news is service providers and operators survived 2020 and 2021, but they may have not been ready to support the rapid increase in bandwidth on their networks. Demand was different for every operator, depending on what their architecture looked like and how their customer base behaved. Video calls, streaming, gaming, and the like are constantly happening and eating up bandwidth, and the trend toward remote-everything shows no sign of slowing down. After the smoke started to clear, 3 big misconceptions came to light.

So, your company received a cybersecurity assessment to identify gaps and risks within your network, but now, you’re left wondering how to create an actionable plan with this new knowledge. Simply identifying the issues isn’t enough to keep the hackers away once they discover vulnerabilities to exploit. The first thing you need to do is bridge the gap between a cybersecurity assessment and what it is to be a secure business. It’s important to remember, good cybersecurity is never complete and shouldn’t be a one-time response to an assessment.

Becoming an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is more complicated than slapping together a network and hitting the ON switch. Stepping back and looking at the entire thing, knowing how each network component will work alongside its peers, and recognizing how each building block functions takes experience. All too often, this perspective isn’t considered until well after the fiber build is complete. This can be especially true with emerging service providers.

Today, every Internet service provider (ISP) is adding customers left and right.

Call volume has skyrocketed. Customer experience is plummeting. Technicians solving problems in the field are doing their best to manage the phone lines (which isn’t panning out). After the incident played out and after a sharp jab to the bottom line, your company decided to outsource call support with a contact center. Through casual research, you find every contact center (or call center for that matter) is comprised of agents. Each agent carries a degree(s) of expertise to enhance the call support team. Each agent also serves as a dedicated or shared agent.

Director of Outside Plant Services, Technology, and Consulting at CCI Systems, Chad Kay, discusses the highs and lows of return path upgrades, what operators will do moving forward. A topic continuing to come up within telecom is upstream bandwidth. The home has become a classroom, office space, and a literal hub of unlimited data needs, because of work from home and learn from home initiatives. For many service providers and operators, this sudden shift in the needs of their customers has influenced a push for increased speed. When do you flip the switch and jump from HFC plant to fiber-to-the-home, PON, or a hybrid solution? The answer isn’t so black and white. It is custom to the situation.