After two years of pandemic lockdowns and reopening stops and starts, aren’t we all grateful to be traveling again? From our standpoint, some of the most welcome parts of 2022 have been the ability to renew our live presence at industry events, to engage with customers and others who might benefit from our OpenVault products and solutions, and to learn more about the issues they are facing and how we can help.
Over the past half dozen months, our passports have been stamped for ANGA COM in Germany, FTTH in Vienna, IBC and Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, and points in-between. Not to mention jaunts to The Independent Show in Orlando and SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Philadelphia.
What we’ve heard time and again is a need for broadband traffic management and remote device management products that can optimize performance, and broadband industry analytics solutions that can deliver insights operators need to drive subscriber satisfaction and loyalty and generate increased ROI.
Let’s be clear: We can have technical conversations all day about broadband monitoring software and IPDR collectors, but what it all comes down to in the end is the impact on subscribers and the bottom line. As broadband speeds increase, subscribers are using more and more bandwidth; it’s up to operators to make sure that that behavior is accommodated – and monetized.
Q3 2022 numbers tell the story: The percentage of subscribers on gigabit tiers is now at an all-time high of 15 percent, and the percentage of subscribers provisioned for speeds of 200-400 Mbps has doubled over the past year, from 27.4 percent in Q3 2021 to 54.8 percent this year. The percentage of super power users of 2 TB or more of data per month has risen by 50 percent during the same time period.
In this environment, it’s more important than ever for operators to know what’s happening on their networks and to have broadband management solutions that can identify and correct those situations that can impair end-user experiences. OpenVault’s Capacity Booster is the first of a new breed of broadband PMA (Profile Management Application) solutions that can add capacity to DOCSIS 3.1 or higher networks – a “virtual node split.”
Ultimately, our goal is the same as it has been since we were founded a dozen years ago – to listen to our operator customers, understand the needs of the industry, and innovate the products that can drive better outcomes. As we approach the end of the year, we wish you the best of the holiday season, and we look forward to meeting with you personally – wherever you are – in the months ahead.