Customer profile

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.

Challenges Overview

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.

Solution

In a close cooperation with the Client’s engineering team, we mirrored in our laboratory the Clients’ environment, with built-in links to their network, with the equipment configured for its real use in a live network, all to achieve the highest accuracy of the outcome.

We defined and agreed with the Customer on a procedure for CPE testing, and as a result, we have prepared three different test scopes:

  • for a new CM implementation,
  • for a new firmware release,
  • a limited scope for minor firmware or hardware changes.

To minimize potential human errors and address repetitive tasks, we are using our automation framework.

Benefits

  • VECTOR TECHNOLOGIES takes end-to-end responsibility for the tests' execution and reporting, developed to match the unique Customer’s requirements.
  • The Client's critical engineering resources are no longer occupied with repetitive, tedious tasks.
  • Automated test procedures guarantee the reliability of the results and shortened the testing time.

Test scope covers the following areas:

  • security
  • regression
  • device management
  • performance
  • robustness

including:

  • TR-69, IPv4/v6 protocols
  • speed tests
  • provisioning
  • performance
  • robustness
  • firmware upgrade via different protocols (SSH, SNMP, HTTP)

and many more…