Connected home trend will lead to even higher dependency on a reliable connection, says UTEL

SUFFOLK, UK & COLOGNE, GERMANY: A leading independent research and development company for telecommunications systems named UTEL is warning operators and service providers to future proof their fibre and copper network upgrades or face increasing numbers of disgruntled customers.

Despite fibre rollout to the home, building or cabinet becoming more and more widespread for many networks across Europe and the rest of the world, for most it is still not possible to monitor status in real time. For most operators managing copper networks it is also not possible to have reliable visibility all of the way into the customer premises.

"Telecom service providers are focusing on smart applications to generate new revenue sources and technology vendors are currently building their product ecosystems. The era of the smart home, coined some twenty or thirty years ago, is now teetering on imminent prominence," says Frank Kaufhold, MD of UTEL.

"At ANGA, there will be no end of discussions on media home gateways, apps for TV usage, home security and smart metering, all of which go way beyond triple play applications. The more customers that rely on these technologies, the more they will notice when the service is disrupted and ultimately the greater the importance network reliability will hold. I predict it will become a key differentiator, even as important as advertised download speeds are now, in the future."

UTEL is the only company in the world to have developed a new complete fibre network management system which includes a central office OTDR fibre test system that can reliably detect ONT reflections through 128 split PONs without expensive wavelength dependent reflectors.

The company also has copper covered with its Test Access Switch Matrix (TASM) which unlike single ended, double ended or metallic line tests (selt, delt, melt), does not rely on an active customer modem. It can detect and isolate faults on the copper line from the contact centre and without the need for skilled engineers to interpret the data.