December 15, 2007

KEITH HAYES

Communications Executive Profile

Keith Hayes, BCE, is vice president, network operations and engineering services, for Charter Communications and also president of the SCTE Foundation.

A year ago, you wrote on the topic of operational data overload and advocated a "triage" mentality. Is this something that you have been able to implement?

Absolutely. In fact, we are taking the same approach that we used to measure critical factors of the customer experience into a one-number figure of merit for the area of operations under evaluation. This health index is then organized in health-based threshold nomenclature - healthy, guarded, serious, and critical - to allow easy identification of the most severely compromised areas for immediate corrective efforts.

Now that we have a year under our belts driving operational improvements in the customer experience categories, we are deploying similar operational triage metrics in facets of the network from the HFC plant to VOD and VoIP complexes. It is amazing to see the buy-in at all levels of our business when only a few key metrics that are inarguable from an impact perspective are organized into a single health index. The improvement - and, quite frankly, the collaborative competition - has been dramatic.

Have you refined or revised or otherwise developed your thinking on this topic?

The only refinement is that we are deploying this schema in other areas as we develop tools to accurately report and analyze network behavior. For example, the three areas of most critical performance of the HFC network on the customer experience are availability, congestion and SNR thresholds. VOD network performance would look at platform availability, stream success ratio, and unique customers experiencing one or more errors.

The good news is these are all building blocks that roll up to the customer health index, but can be organized in the same fashion, so there is immediate comprehension by those operating that portion of the network.

We're sensing a real hunger in top performing cable systems to move into a proactive zone. Is this, perhaps finally, becoming an actionable item?

In the last 24 months or so, I have seen a significant change of focus in the industry from being primarily reactionary to becoming primarily pro-actionary. Some of this is due to analytical tools maturing to the point that we can use the distributed intelligence of network endpoints in customers' premises to report on network health, particularly sudden aberrations, but also the recognition that life is easier after you do the hard work of shifting into a pro-active mindset. Even though it is a pain to sweep the network at night, you get a lot fewer phone calls and truck rolls.

With the acceleration of services beyond triple play, are there any new tools that the industry really needs?

There are definitely a couple of "Holy Grail" tools needed - the first of which is a tool that will quantitatively measure digital video quality and report in real time where the digital artifact originated: production, uplink, downlink, muxing, optical transport, HFC hiccup, buffer overrun on the set-top, and so on.

The second will be an effective, easy-to-use switched digital video traffic management tool: What do you broadcast, what do you switch? This tool would have to be nimble enough to not only calculate the "Erlang equivalent" in each switched service group, but also be able to react if a relatively lightly viewed channel had short-term content changes that would significantly increase viewership.

Last, but certainly not least, what if each and every set-top, modem, and MTA could enter a diagnostic mode at 2 a.m. each day, after checking to ensure there was no customer activity, and quickly sweep through each channel to measure receive power, SNR, BER, adaptive equalizer tap values, etc., and then report the date back to a central network health application that would look for both threshold excursions as well as sudden but not yet customer-impacting changes? Talk about the Holy Grail for a robust network!