Making Cable Networks Ready For The Future Through Operations Benchmarking

The current telecommunications business is characterized by fierce competition between Multi System Operators (MSOs) and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) (both called "CSP" in the rest of this paper), flat revenues, and rising network demands and stressing costs. A high percentage of cost is in network OPEX can be attributed to operations, which establishes a strong driver for operations optimization initiatives. Benchmarking is the key optimization enabler, helping to identify best practices and improvement areas with variations larger than 50% observed between CSPs in selective network domains . These quantitative representations of business performance are highly valued by CSP decision makers to help prioritize optimization initiatives. The major challenge in quantitative benchmarking is obtaining comparable data sets. The comparisons are not straightforward because of differences in business environments. Such differentiation factors like geography, urbanization, infrastructure maturity level, Gross Domestic Product and others impact the business performance of communication provider operations, making direct comparisons difficult. Therefore, normalization of measurements and performance indicators (PIs) is necessary. This paper will provide a survey of measurement areas applicable to CSPs. A classification of measurements is proposed, along with mapping of differentiation factors into normalization formulae. Drill-down dimensions of the normalization outcome and synergies between cost modeling and efficiency benchmarking are discussed.