blockchain Media

Everyone’s gearing up for the ACA-NCTC Independent Show in Anaheim next week, including solutions provider OpenVault. The company works with more than 100 broadband providers around the world, using data from more than 4mln subscribers and various disparate systems to help operators see the entire network subscriber topography. From there, it’s all about problem solving.

“The more data that we can collect, the more valuable we become because of the way we can take that data and turn it into information, especially when aggregated with all the other data we collect,” OpenVault founder and CEO Mark Trudeau told Cablefax. “We’re all about give us as much data as you possible can and we will make that data useful.”

It’s touting a new lineup for the show with its “Revenue Accelerator” being the main attraction. The tool builds on what OpenVault is already doing by identifying the potential an operator has for boosting revenues through its customers that could upgrade to a higher plan due to their usage and then giving the operator the tools to take action and microtarget candidates.

“We want to provide the operator with the ammunition they need when they’re speaking with a subscriber to move them on to the next tier, which typically comes with another $10-$15 or more in revenue/month,” Trudeau said.

OpenVault identifies those upgrade candidates by looking at bandwidth utilization versus their package speed. If a customer is consistently bumping up against the speed of their given plan, they automatically become a prime candidate.

“You have the services that you’re using and the devices in your home—you’re using all available bandwidth,” Trudeau noted. “So you probably need more. And if you don’t need more today, you’ll need more tomorrow.”

The product could also end up saving operators some time, energy and money if a customer begins to complain about their service. The problem could very well be that the customer doesn’t have the right plan to serve their needs, and a technician can’t do anything to service that if they make the drive to a customer’s home.

And OpenVault’s latest capability can take you inside of the home anyways. The upgrade allows it to look inside at the home at the devices connected to the WiFi networks and seeing how many are there are at any given time. That in itself can easily be enough to overwhelm a network.

“In the past, the operators had no visibility to this type of information, and while they might have upgrades going on, they never have the ammunition to say to a customer, ‘look, you are bumping up against your speed,’ or ‘you have 27 connected devices, you should move to the next tier,’” Trudeau said.

Some other factors OpenVault considers are those that are out of their hands: can the customer’s modem even handle a higher speed, or is the network healthy enough to move the subscriber up? While this tool from OpenVault is focused on how to get customers to upgrade, the company also has been investigating how it can help operators retain those on the brink of cordcutting. While it hasn’t deployed a tool yet, OpenVault has been brainstorming with current operators to see how one could be developed.

“If they can provide us with the subscribers that have cut the cord over the last year, we can look at those subscribers and look at how their broadband usage patterns changed leading up to and post that cord cutting event,” Trudeau said. “That’s the kind of thing we can then use to provide a predictive tool for the operators.”

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