WOW deepens relationship with broadband analytics vendor OpenVault

NEW ORLEANS—Broadband analytics vendor OpenVault announced on Tuesday an extension and enhancement of its longstanding relationship with WOW.

OpenVault is working to help cable operators place their broadband subscribers in the correct tiers in order to further monetize their services. OpenVault collects subscribers' usage behaviors, and puts them into data sets that provide cable operators with the tools to right-size their broadband subscriber services.

With the extended agreement, WOW will tap into an expanded toolbox of OpenVault operations, analytics and policy products not only to get visibility into subscribers’ broadband usage and its impact on the WOW network, but also to inform future steps that can improve availability and quality of broadband service for the company’s more than 800,000 customers.

“OpenVault’s tools provide aggregated and anonymized insight into WOW customers’ broadband habits and usage, which allows us to better manage our network so we can best deliver our innovative products and services to our customers,” said WOW's Blair Day, senior vice president, product and network engineering, in a statement. “As we continue to work together, OpenVault’s market insights will help us continue to understand and respond to our customers’ desires to use broadband services where they want, when they want and how they want.”

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OpenVault provides cable operators with a set of command lines to put on their cable modem termination systems (CMTS) to collect Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) data that is then pushed back to OpenVault. OpenVault can collect the data, which includes traffic counts, at the subscriber level, every 15 minutes to see how much bandwidth each cable broadband subscriber is using.

OpenVault also does simple network management protocol (SNMP) polling with the CMTS to measure and cull statistics on the utilization levels for every interface.

All of the analytics of the subscriber data can be used to either notify subscribers when they are approaching the threshold of their data usage if there are data caps in place, or provide information to the service provider for marketing purposes to upgrade a user to a higher tier of service. Cable operators can also send OpenVault a file, typically nightly, with subscriber-level data.

Since OpenVault's business model is software-as-a-service, it doesn’t require hardware installs with cable operators. The cloud model also allows OpenVault to quickly deploy its solutions via cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.