Overview
For the modern household, it’s essential that there is enough bandwidth to go around. Whether it’s to work from home, do schoolwork, stream videos or play video games, connectivity needs to provide an optimal end-user experience for everyone.
Challenge
WYOMING.COM FOCUSED on improving the quality of experience for video streaming applications. This was especially important because the cost of streaming video content escalated for homes outside the cities. Their goal was to offer customers better service than costly satellite or fiber/cable while also increasing the amount of bandwidth for home broadband subscribers.
Wyoming.com was founded in 1994 as an internet service provider in the southern half of Wyoming and has roughly 5,500 subscribers. A majority of their subscribers are residential, and they also serve some businesses. Before they started reinvesting in their network, churn rate was higher than they liked, and service wasn’t performing as they expected. Something had to change.
Solution
WYOMING.COM DECIDED TO reduce or completely eliminate buffering issues with Quality of Experience (QoE) solutions from Cambium Networks. With granular application shaping, dynamic queue-based rate limiting, congestion management and application insights, broadband service providers have immediate access to the information and controls to optimize end user experiences. QoE would also prevent a second user at one location from taking up all the bandwidth. The entire deployment process was fast; within one and a half weeks, Wyoming.com started having the conversation about Cambium Networks’ QoE, built the service profile, provisioned the system and tested the product.
Installation of the QoE solution was quick and easy—software was loaded up, they completed the configuration and dropped it in line within an overnight maintenance window.
Wyoming.com’s most popular packages are 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload. The highest package they offer is one gigabit download and one gigabit upload. This is mainly on point-to-point fixed wireless broadband and fiber technology.
Wyoming.com started demonstrating the capabilities with the one-gigabit appliance, where they built up queues and then switched over to the 10-gigabit appliance and put it right in the core where 80 to 90% of customer traffic flows. Now, they are able to drill down per customer, per IP level. They manage the QoE appliance themselves.
The QoE interface is easy to work with, and the web interface is more streamlined. It’s easier to get data out of it, make configuration changes and set up new priority queues or optimization queues.
Results
Now, video streaming applications load almost instantaneously. Rather than waiting for a video to load, users can watch the show they were previously watching straight away. Approximately 80-90% of customers are utilizing the appliance, or about 4,000 customers.
So far, Wyoming.com has been able to measure their quality of experience by calls that were coming into their call center of people complaining about video buffering or insufficient speeds. They can look at their utilization and see that they were maxing out their bandwidth. Then, the team can explain to the customer that when they’re maxing out their bandwidth.
The team has not received complaints from customers about speeds; previously, they had between five and eight calls per week prior to the QoE solution.