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January 2003 Issue

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FROM THE SCTE LIST

Truck Roll Metrics

Can truck-roll statistics shed light on network performance? That's the question that came from Paul Browne, engineering manager of Chorus, an Irish broadband Internet provider. Frank Yaskin of 4th Wave Technologies offered one response:

For what it's worth, once upon a time, I considered a monthly rate of 1 percent (truck rolls per subs) to be pretty good. It varied from .9 something to 1.3 or so, as long as there were no extraordinary events, such as an addressable problem, weather related events, or other external event.

That was 600 calls per month in a 60,000-sub system, and it

included no-fault-founds, customer education, and such.

That was with analog video service, and service calls only; no change of service or install tasks, so other product offerings and methods of tallying truck rolls will certainly give other figures.

Insight Communications' Paul Sherman recommended looking at these data on an annualized basis:

Your truck rolls are an indirect method of measuring network performance. Obviously, a test and measurement approach like FCC Proof of Performance testing is a direct method.

It would seem that the benefit of the indirect method is that your snapshot consists of a larger sample and can be captured by your billing software (Cabledata, Convergys, CSG, etc.). If you're going to use this method, you may want to look at it from the standpoint of annualized service calls instead of truck rolls.

Service call percentage is the number of service calls in any given period relative to your subscriber base and expressed as a percentage. Annualizing them means that you must first take the period of service calls and express it as if it were the number of service calls over a year. So if you had 1,000 service calls in a month you would use 12,000 as an annualized number. If your subscriber base is 100,000, your annualized trouble-call percentage would be 12,000/100,000, or 12 percent.

Two other metrics should be considered. Repeat service calls within some time period from the first visit should be ignored for your annualized trouble calls, as they are uncorrected service calls and will skew your numbers upward. Similarly, trouble calls within some time period of an installation should be factored out since they represent poor installations and do not reflect on network performance. For that matter you can ignore any type of service call that you feel does not reflect on network performance.

If you are measuring annualized trouble calls you would be looking for some percentage less than 10 percent as good performance.

SCTE-List is an e-mail forum that enables technology professionals in the cable telecommunications community to discuss issues, exchange knowledge, share ideas and problem solve. For more information on this SCTE- sponsored service, visit www.scte.org.

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