case study
A leading broadband connectivity company and cable operator serving tens of millions of customers in the US.
Through an advanced communication network, the company offers a full range of state-of-the-art residential and business services.
Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) vendors release new firmware versions at least once a year, sometimes even more often, for example in order to implement security patches. Validation of the new firmware in the carrier’s specific environment is required to ensure that cable modems will work without impacting the end-user experience and to minimize the risk of churn. This is repetitive, tedious and time-consuming work that must be done in a secure manner. To keep operators’ resources focused on their core tasks, the best solution is to outsource these tasks to a reliable partner.
Based on our best practices developed over years of performing CPE tests in numerous network environments, in close cooperation with the client’s engineering team we carried out a test scope and procedure for CPE testing. As a result, three different scenarios were prepared: for a new CM implementation, for a new firmware release, and a limited scope for minor firmware or hardware changes. Subsequently, we mirrored clients’ architecture in our laboratory to achieve the highest accuracy of the outcome. To minimize potential human errors and address repetitive tasks, we used our automation framework. VECTOR’s engineering team was directly interfacing with the vendor in case of any firmware bugs.
