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April 2001 Issue
Deployment Showcase: AT&T Broadband Surpasses Telephony Target
By Natalia A. Feduschak

Last year was tumultuous for AT&T Broadband, yet the company connected 560,000 customers to its circuit-switched system.

Last year, AT&T Broadband achieved what some in the cable industry say was a Herculean task—signing up 560,000 cable telephony customers. The achievement seemed even greater, considering that for months Wall Street had been criticizing AT&T for not moving quickly enough with cable deployments after its $1 billion acquisition of TCI (which became AT&T Broadband) and the multi-million dollar purchase of MediaOne. Then, just as its telephony deployments reached 17,000 customers a week, AT&T announced it was breaking the company up into four separate entities, essentially putting to an end its dream of becoming a single source telecommunications provider.

To be sure, while AT&T Broadband says it will continue its aggressive deployment of telephony customers over the next year—despite the restructuring—clouds may appear on the horizon. Suggested job layoffs could slow deployment down. And then there is a growing feeling among analysts that telephony isn’t catching on as quickly as the industry thought. It would appear people are happy with their plain old telephone service (POTS).

Still, AT&T Broadband says it was able to connect so many telephony customers in 2000 because of careful planning, close cooperation with the vendors who provided the company with its circuit-switched telephony system and proper training.

Getting started: Integrating systems

AT&T Broadband faced several technical challenges in trying to connect so many telephony customers in such a short period of time, Cathy Kilstrom, senior vice president for telephony operations, says.

Essentially, the company decided to tackle those challenges in two phases. Last year was spent ensuring the company could manage its rapid telephony deployment, as well as taking the first steps to integrate the circuit-switched systems it inherited from its acquisitions of TCI and MediaOne. This year will be spent continuing work on systems integration, expanding its footprint of market-ready homes (currently in 18 markets) and making the business more efficient and profitable.

When AT&T Broadband decided to take the plunge into telephony, the company knew it had to integrate all three of its circuit-switched systems in order to achieve what Kilstrom calls "a common look" throughout its entire network. TCI had used an ADC circuit-switched system, while MediaOne had installed Arris and Tellabs products. All three circuit-switched systems use Class 5 switches.

"What we have today are different platforms that have different operating procedures completely," says Kilstrom. "That’s what we have to change to get that common look."

To start the process of integration, AT&T Broadband first made a "huge capital investment" (Kilstrom won’t disclose the cost) to get the network infrastructure ready. This investment included making the plant two-way ready, ensuring that the switches and transport network worked well, plus mapping out a detailed management plan that would help the company fulfill its swift telephony deployment.

"That was one of the huge front endeavors," Kilstrom says.

Next, AT&T Broadband carried out a series of tests, common to most cable networks, such as bit error rate and network validation testing, to ensure continuity and quality throughout the three circuit-switched systems. Systems integration is achieved through operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) software. The company also tested back-office procedures, such as end-to-end processes and order management provisioning, throughout the system.

To manage the deployment, AT&T Broadband established a detailed program management plan, hiring the skills of Lockheed Martin to make sure it covered all the important bases.

"We had a very disciplined plan, but also a plan that allowed for things like risk management and issues management," Kilstrom says. "We could recognize the best plan doesn’t include everything."

AT&T built in contingencies, such as where the company could shift manpower if necessary, while not disrupting the deployment schedule.

To achieve a continuity throughout its markets, AT&T Broadband also introduced so-called BSACs, which are business-to-business assurance centers. These local centers have two primary functions. They keep local plants running smoothly. Secondly, they have around-the-clock dispatch capability so if an alarm goes off in the national network operations center (NOC), which monitors the equipment of all the vendors, and a problem can’t be fixed remotely, someone from the local BSAC may be dispatched to take care of it.

Vendors critical to success

The participation of the three vendors—ADC, Arris and Tellabs—was critical to AT&T’s success. Their cooperation helped AT&T meet its targets by providing a steady flow of equipment, customizing products, simplifying programs and helping train installers.

Meeting equipment demands on voice ports was a principle challenge for Arris, says Mike Horton, director of media relations for Arris, which supplied AT&T with its Cornerstone Voice product.

AT&T doesn’t allow Arris to release the specific configuration of its system, Horton says. However, the typical Cornerstone Voice configuration for the headends many companies use:

• Consists of 30,000 subscribers and the equivalent number of voice ports;
• Assumes 1.3 lines per subscriber;
• Carries 39,000 lines;
• Assumes 2,400 lines per host digital terminal (HDT);
• Consists of 14 dual modem cards (DMC) per HDT; and
• Supports the configuration of 16 HDT, 224 DMC and two optical controllers.

AT&T did a good job in forecasting how many ports it needed, Horton says. Yet with the rapid pace of deployment, Arris found itself occasionally making field deliveries and airlifting products from its manufacturing facilities around the world in order to meet the target.

"AT&T needed a much greater inventory because it accelerated its deployments," Horton says. Delivering by air cost Arris more, but it was more important to meet AT&T’s demands, he says.

ADC, which produces the Homeworx telephony system for hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks, customized some elements of its product for AT&T.

"They had asked us for maintenance and diagnostic tools that gave them the ability to pick out unique customer sets, look at the data coming back from the networks and monitor them," Eric Hartford, senior marketing manager for ADC’s broadband access transport group, says. "We helped in troubleshooting to see if subscriber units were off-node." The other vendors also provided diagnostics when necessary.

ADC’s HDT carries up to 672 simultaneous digital signals, level zero (DS0s) upstream and downstream in 18 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum, or up to 224 calls in each of three 6 MHz channels. All of the HDT elements are equipped with back-up redundancy for better telephony reliability.

Hartford says meeting the demands of the quick rollout was easier because ADC had worked with AT&T and MediaOne in the past to ensure features both companies had wanted were incorporated into their telephony systems. Thus many were already in place by the time deployment began.

"We spent a lot of time to make the network management system as simple as possible," says Jeff Schmitz, Tellabs’ director of marketing for its broadband group. "One of the most expensive things you can do is roll out a truck." For instance, before a truck is rolled out to the home, an operator is able to look into a home to determine if a telephony problem stems from a wiring problem or a phone merely has been left off the hook.

AT&T Broadband is using Tellabs’s CableSpan 2300, which provides integration of circuit-switched voice and data, IP data and voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services. The solution supports managed access speeds for voice and data ranging from 64 kilobits per second (kbps) to 2.5 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Training the installers

Vendors also were critical in helping AT&T Broadband train the thousands of installers necessary for deploying telephony.

To meet its manpower needs, AT&T Broadband subcontracted its installations. Each contractor underwent training with the appropriate vendor in how its system worked, then taught the contractor’s employees.

To show installers the types of problems they might encounter, vendors ran through a number of real-life scenarios in training labs.

"We put people in an environment with user interface terminals. They did provisioning, fault isolation and ran through a real operational environment," Arris’ Horton says.

Typically, installation was done in two stages. First, the installer visited the home to attach the customer premise equipment (CPE) to the side of the house, then returned later when customers were home to run the appropriate wires within the dwelling. That reduced the time installers were actually inside the home. Many installers also taught telephony subscribers how to use their new phones.

AT&T’s Kilstrom admits making two truck rolls was more expensive, but contends that its benefits outweighed the costs. For one, the quicker the installation, the less chance the customer will cancel. And once customers are hooked up to a telephony system, more than 90 percent stay with the service, she says.

This two-step system allowed AT&T Broadband to cut installation times by nearly half in some markets. In 1999, a typical installation took 5.2 hours. The company set a target rate of 2.5 hours for 2000. By the end of 2000, the average installation ran 2.7 hours, with some running under two hours.

Kilstrom won’t say how many installers were involved. In the third quarter of 2000, however, AT&T Broadband was connecting 17,000 customers a week. That helped the company reach an overall penetration rate of 8 percent to 9 percent across all of its markets.

Migration to IP

Kilstrom says AT&T will continue to deploy circuit-switched telephony this year.

"In 2001, we’ll continue to focus on growth and make the business more efficient and profitable," she says.

The company plans to migrate to IP telephony, but Kilstrom won’t say when that might happen.

"We absolutely have a plan to get there," she says. "But it’s a ways off."

That IP telephony doesn’t appear to be in the near horizon for AT&T is not surprising, says Claude Romans, director for access networks at Ryan Hankin Kent, Inc., a telecommunications research firm in San Francisco. The cable giant is working with the proven circuit-switched technology, and in today’s competitive marketplace, AT&T Broadband needs to unveil telephony.

Still, because telephony isn’t a high-margin business, Romans doubts it will become a major part of AT&T Broadband.

In addition, cable telephony analyst Keith Kennebeck of The Strategis Group, says the take-up rate for the service isn’t rapid. Partly, that’s because people are happy with their regular phone service. Also, cable telephony still hasn’t proven to be as inexpensive as some in the industry thought it would be. AT&T Broadband was able to get so many people to hook up to the service because it offered customers great deals, like free installation and service, Kennebeck says.

"The reason they were so aggressive was they wanted to show the investors and analysts that they really were becoming a converged cable operator at the forefront of the cable space. It’s a pretty big achievement. But don’t forget, AT&T had a lot of resources."

Natalia A. Feduschak is senior editor of CT.

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