 |
 |
In late spring of 2000, after several years of
double-digit growth in the circuit switched telephony
product, Cox found that manual provisioning of the
various network elements was starting to inhibit further
growth. Impressed with Sigma's work on the earlier iTV
project, Venood Kurup, the Director of IT at Cox, asked
Sigma to propose a solution for automating the telephony
provisioning. The system would have to decrease the time
for an order while ensuring all business rules were
followed to automate order management and service
provisioning processes. In addition the Sigma OSS
solution would have to integrate with their current
billing system without requiring extensive
modifications, scale to handle their large projected
subscriber growth, and interface with multiple down
steam network elements for automated service
provisioning.
About a year later growing problems and uncertainties at
Excite@Home, the cable industry's outsourced ISP, led
Cox to decide to bring all high-speed access, Email, and
web-space service management in-house. Cox would need a
solution to provide a configurable and adaptable
solution for provisioning high-speed Internet service
across their nationwide network (with both proprietary
as well as DOCSIS modems) before Excite@Home dissolved,
yet the solution must be able to scale with Cox's
accelerated growth plans for HSD subscriber acquisition.
Finally, Cox's management wanted to move aggressively
towards bundled voice and data service offerings,
providing further justification for a single OSS
platform with Sigma Systems. |
 |
|
The OSS product set implemented at Cox consists of the
Sigma ServiceBroker Workflow Management Engine and
functional components of the Sigma Service Management
Platform in conjunction with a set of technology
adapters to integrate with third-party billing; device
provisioning, e-mail, and web-space systems for HSD; and
class 5 telephony switch, host digital terminals, and
voice-mail systems for circuit-switched cable telephony.
Cox also makes extensive use of the
Sigma Service
Creation Toolkit to allow its own developers to make
enhancements to the existing system to meet ever
changing business requirements and to build adapters and
process workflows for newly acquired network equipment. |
 |
|
Sigma Systems worked very closely with Cox's developers
and its system integrator to define overall solution
requirements, provide product configuration and
customizations and deliver the final solutions. Cox was
able to cut the provisioning time of a telephony order
from over three minutes to less than 20 seconds while
growing to be the 12th largest telephony company in the
US. All of their HSD and ISP services were successfully
migrated off Excite@Home without any major loss of
service. Today, Cox is one of the few cable companies to
be able to deliver the "triple-play" of broadband
services and do it on a single bill; with Sigma Systems
as the mission critical OSS system for voice and data
service management. |
| |
| |
|
 |
 |
Cox Communications is
the fourth largest cable company in North America with
more than 6.5 million residential customers in 23
states. In addition to basic cable entertainment, Cox
offers digital cable, high-speed Internet access, and
cable telephony.
Sigma Systems has been a key vendor to Cox in the
automated OSS service management area since January of
2000 when it was selected to assist Cox in automating
the provisioning and management of advanced broadband
services. Cox has made extensive use of Sigma's
multi-service management solutions; first for the
support of Interactive TV services in a technology
trial, and later to commercially implement voice and
data services using a single OSS platform. Sigma's
proven North American and Worldwide cable deployments,
solid customer references coupled with proven scale and
reliability were key factors in Cox's decision to
implement Sigma's OSS solution. |
 |
"Deploying
reliable and scalable operations support solutions is
key to maintaining and building on our unprecedented
growth in convergent video and communications services.
We are seeing decreased service activation times and
greatly improved provisioning accuracy as a result of
deploying Sigma's solutions."
- Veenod Kurup,
Vice President, Data Product Services, Cox
|
| |
|
|
