3 Considerations To Successfully Manage a Major Network Outage

Our subscribers are more than customers—they are our friends and neighbors. We’ve served rural Tennessee for almost a century as an electric cooperative, and today we provide high-speed fiber internet. We pride ourselves on building trusted relationships, which set us apart from larger competitor—and contributed to our incredible Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®) of more than 90.   
 

It's also why we must act immediately when an outage strikes. In early March, a major storm ripped through our community (the worst in almost 30 years). Over 60,000 members lost electric power, and over 60 fiber mainline locations suffered service-impacting damage.  
 

Our network runs on the Calix platform—including Calix Operations Cloud (Operations Cloud)—so we received critical alarms from the optical network terminals (ONTs) and optical line terminals (OLTs) affected by the power outage. We correlated this information with data from the electric grid and other outage information from Operations Cloud, including a real-time map showing the status and location of impacted ONTs and OLTs.  

3 Considerations for a Major Outage Response  

Our experience during this major outage helped us refine our approach—with three key areas to consider:  

• Determine who is impacted and why. Once power is restored, Operations Cloud helps us to assess which ONTs and passive optical network (PON) ports are offline—enabling us to organize outages into groups.  

• Communicate effectively across operations, field techs, and customer support. Using Calix Cloud® tools, we can provide outage visualization and notifications across business functions so that the right people get the right information at the right time.  

• Act swiftly to resolve the damage. Actionable insights from Operations Cloud enable us to quickly identify the outage’s root cause, dispatch the right team, and reduce our mean time to resolution. 
   

We’re excited to partner with Calix on new capabilities that provide enhanced visibility into our network to identify outages in real-time—and the ability to communicate this information to multiple stakeholders across business functions. Our goal is to dramatically reduce customer support calls by proactively engaging with our subscribers in times of crisis and continuing to nurture our trusted relationships.   

Learn more about new capabilities in Calix Operations Cloud in this eBook: "How To Make Your Broadband Operations a Subscriber Experience Differentiator: Embrace Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning."

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score^SM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.