Dish Network has hired former CenturyLink executive Atilla Tinic as senior VP and chief information officer.

Tinic, who held a similar title at Level 3 Communications when CenturyLink acquired it last year, will replace Rob Dravenstott, who quietly left Dish in August to join Chicago-based IoT company Cooler Screens.

At Dish, Tinic will lead IT strategy and operations for Dish TV, Sling TV and the wireless groups. The Denver resident will stay close to home, working out of Dish’s Englewood, Colo. headquarters.

He’ll report to Dish chief operating officer John Swieringa

"Atilla has proven that he can lead technology organizations that deliver innovation, plus he possesses that sense of adventure we look for in a leader," said Swieringa, in a statement. "His track record of business partnership will serve our enterprise today, as well as our future wireless business."

Arris announced that veteran IT executive Karen Renner will be its new chief information officer, replacing Phil Baldock, who quietly left the company last month to join POS terminal technology vendor Verifone.

Renner arrives from global defense contractor Thales, where she served as North American CIO since May 2017. Before that, she held CIO positions at aluminum producer Novelis from 2010-2016, and at General Electronic from 2005-2010.

She’ll report directly to Arris CEO Bruce McClelland, working out of Arris’ Suwanee, Georgia headquarters.

"Karen Renner is a firm believer in building the culture, capacity, and capability of the IT team to take full advantage of digital opportunities that help drive business results," McClelland said in a statement. “Arris will look to Karen to strengthen our IT program in pursuit of our next stage of growth.”

Added Renner: ”What drew me to Arris is its focus on transforming the way people connect in our digital world. I look forward to refining that focus through our IT program as part of the Arris executive leadership team.”

Baldock joined Arris in 2016 amid the Pace acquisition. 

As content distribution channels continue to expand in the United States and abroad, the business of formatting and delivering that content has become an increasingly complex minuet. As vice president of media and content delivery for Scripps Networks Interactive, Chuck Hurst and his team bring together broadcast operations, IT and affiliate sales, making sure Scripps’s content is delivered to the correct distributor in the correct format at the correct time. Multichannel News contributor K.C. Neel spoke with Hurst about the intricacies involved in that daily dance.

MCN: What part of the business do you oversee at Scripps?

Chuck Hurst: I am responsible for all of our enterprise media management, videos, still images, recipes, closed captions and all the distribution to our business partners for those products. That includes our own digital group, as well as external partners that we engage with to provision and display our video.

MCN: How do your distribution contracts today differ from a couple of years ago, and how is content delivered and stored through your unit?

CH: One of the biggest changes in the industry is the advent of IT-distributed content, whether that’s over-the-top, whether that’s sell-through to entities like iTunes, or whether that’s SVOD like Amazon.

That next-day demand for multiplatform distribution has forced us to increase our network. We’ve also had to increase our storage and we’ve had to go out and get transcoding resources. Even our transfer capability — the ability to push that content out to all of our providers — has forced us to increase all [our IT resources].

Let me give you an example: In 2006, we were pushing out about 200 hours of content a year. Last year, we pushed out 30,000 hours of content. And the quality of video that’s going out the door today has dramatically increased.

The other big change that has come out of that has been in our business processes. Broadcast has always been king — and it still is, by the way — but the digital side of the house has become equally mission-critical. There’s a real natural partnership between broadcast operations, IT and a content sales organization in the way we deliver that content in the timeframe we do.

MCN: How do you break down the business unit silos of IT, broadcast engineering, affiliate relations? What do have to do to make sure everyone is on the same page?

CH: Customer expectations are forcing that integration of business functions, because you can’t satisfy those expectations with a single group.

[For example] our affiliate group is responsible for content distribution deals and they deal not only with the [traditional multichannel distributor] affiliates, they deal with iTunes and Amazon and the other providers we choose to exhibit our content.

The broadcast operations group — who are really the experts on video quality, video handling and the video formats we need to have — needed to reach into the IP-delivered world. The affiliate group has done a great job of engaging with us as they get deals. They bring them in, we evaluate the technical specifications, we talk about the metadata, we talk about the video spec and we come back to them with recommendations for changes to the ways that we can make this work. And that has been a very effective cycle for us.

MCN: I get the impression the content requirements and the way content is delivered to various new distributors — Netflix, Amazon, Apple — varies. Is that the case?

CH: Yes, and in some cases, wildly. The current digital distribution market is very dynamic. The broadcast market has a relatively fixed set of deliverables, but that’s not true in the digital world. There is also a constant escalation of the quality and everyone wants a slightly different flavor of the video. So even if they all want Apple protocols, they want different features or they might have a different bumper or trailer. It’s very hard to get standards, even internally, as we look across the providers. We’ve had to stitch together commercial applications, custom applications and integrate those together to give us a very flexible, dynamic environment where we can make changes right away. We’re supporting around 22 different receivers right now. That will probably grow to be about 26 by the end of the year and each one of them will be a relatively different product.

MCN: Are there outside IT applications that you can purchase or subscribe to that help you with all of that?

CH: Certainly, there is a growing body of providers that will entirely outsource your media preparation. There is a real cost tradeoff on that because those obviously are not cheap resources to employ. Our IT group has fit in with our media operations group and our broadcast operations group to create an automated workflow while reducing the manual intervention we have to do to get content out the door.

MCN: How are you storing all this data? How many hours are you storing right now? Are you using the cloud to store your product?

CH: Well, hours and bytes are different. From an hours perspective, let’s say episodes, I think we’re about 45,000 episodes of standard def and somewhere around 20,000 hours of high-definition video. And then you add onto that some of the digital flavors that we store.

In terms of bytes, we’re sitting at about 1.3 Petabytes of digital storage for our video archive. That will probably grow this year to about 2 PB. And that’s all on an internal disk we store here inside our own data center facility.

We use cloud storage in a very limited aspect right now. We have a rotating set of assets we take up to the cloud for a particular job and then bring those down. So we really have only about 60 Terabytes of storage on the cloud right now. Cloud storage will grow, but right now, all of our storage is pretty much internal.

MCN: What will it take to transition to cloud storage and what are its advantages?

CH: We can still expand with the internal system we have in place right now. Still, the cloud and the cloud infrastructure are an integral part of what we want to do in the future. I expect we will maintain hybrid operations, meaning we’ll do operations both internally and in the cloud and then add some level of synchronization back and forth for that.

The big driver for the cloud is certainly going to be time to market. There are some things you can just do more rapidly in the cloud. We could transcode the entire archive to a new flavor that we want to use, or carve off part of that collection for a new opportunity overseas. Global access is a big driver for using the cloud.

Certainly, cost is a challenge right now. Trying to move up a 2-PB archive into the cloud is going to be expensive. And it’s going to be an operating expense, as opposed to a capital investment, which hits your bottom line in the year you spend that.

MCN: How do you measure success? What does that mean for your unit?

CH: Whether you are in broadcast operations, IT or digital, you really have to measure yourself against the business metrics that your business partner is being held to. For us, that’s been a conversation around on-time delivery, making sure that we meet all the contractual obligations. It’s also about cost: What’s the actual cost for us to deliver an hour to an end provider and end user? It’s been a refreshing conversation and it’s forced the IT team to examine their processes and the way they measure themselves.

MCN: What’s the biggest challenge for you going forward? What does your business look like in 18 months from now?

CH: The biggest challenge for any IT group right now is the tremendous amount of pressure to respond more quickly to the business opportunities coming in the door and to be able to operate more efficiently. There is continual pressure to respond to the market and deal with the changes that are needed but, at the same time, stay within your budget and head count.

So where are we going to be 18 months from now? It’s obvious viewer fragmentation is an ongoing issue in the industry. There are more ways every day for people to consume video. That means more platforms, more formats, more delivery cycles to get out there. We must also remain focused on our brand and on quality. It’s going be a real challenge to continue standing out in the market because there are so many different sources of information. And there is certainly a technology component to in the way people find us, how they see us, and what they associate us with.

Cablevision Systems’s recently launched voice-over-WiFi service, Freewheel, is unlikely to be the last such offering, as cable operators continue to add hotspots in their service territories and develop new ways to monetize WiFi technology.

To do that, they need to up their game in terms of the reliability, strength and availability of WiFi access.

Many operators are moving in that direction, but it’s going to take a couple of years for carrier-grade WiFi to be ubiquitously deployed across the country, according to several experts in the field.

A recent survey from Real Wireless for St. Louis-based billings and operations software vendor Amdocs found that carrier-grade WiFi will grow from 14% in 2014 to 85% by the end of 2016. Some 85% of operator respondents said they plan to invest in carrier-grade WiFi by that time.

MARKING MORE HOTSPOTS

The survey found 77% of cable operators will have WiFi hotspots in their service territories by 2016 and 72% of those hotspots will be carrier- grade by 2018, Amdocs chief technology officer, broadband, cable and satellite division Ken Roulier said.

Today’s cable-industry WiFi offerings are predominantly a “best-effort” product, rather than a carrier-grade service. Consumer expectations are currently tamped down because service can be spotty and intermittent.

Customer satisfaction is one of many reasons to upgrade an MSO’s WiFi network to carrier-grade, Caroline Gabriel, co-founder of Hampshire, England-based consultancy Rethink Technology Research, said.

“We believe that one to two years from now, we’ll see full quad plays and most operators will be offering some type of voice service,” she said. “Operators are adding a lot of hotspots very quickly. But the big challenge will be the quality of those hotspots.”

New lines of business and revenue streams that could result include mobile voice; data-offload services for spectrum- constrained mobile operators; and a viable and robust TV-everywhere product, Gabriel said.

Cablevision estimates about 60% of the traffic on its Optimum WiFi network is streaming video. So while having a voiceover- WiFi (VoWiFi) service is attractive glue that makes customers happier with their service provider, the carrier-grade WiFi also enables customers to become truly mobile with all their services, including video.

The world is clearly going wireless and it’s doing so at a breakneck speed. A recent study by Cisco Systems found mobile traffic is expected to grow 18-fold between 2011 and 2016. Cellular spectrum is limited and building macrocell sites is expensive, so small-cell solutions — such as WiFi — are becoming more attractive every day.

Cisco’s study predicts that VoWiFi traffic will surpass voice-over-LTE traffic by 2017. And the number of WiFi-capable tablets and PCs, at 1.9 billion, will outnumber cellular- capable tablets and PCs (542 million) by 2019.

Real Wireless, surveying for Amdocs, found that 66% of respondents are attracted to carrier-grade WiFi networks because of the opportunity to offer mobile voice and real TV-everywhere capabilities.

Mobile network operators (MNOs) see WiFi primarily as an offload product to current mobile offerings. The survey found that 72% of cable operators plan to deploy carrier-grade networks by 2018 while 66% of mobile network operators have similar plans. In other words, MNOs could offload their excess data to third-party WiFi networks.

This is already happening to a degree, the experts noted, but will increase as mobile usage continues to expand.

Cablevision spent $300 million in 2007 to build one of the most robust WiFi networks in the country. The company currently has about 1.1 million hotspots inside and outside the home. It’s naive to say upgrading operators’ networks to carrier grade will be inexpensive and easy, Gabriel said.

But there are plenty of companies, including Amdocs, Cisco and others, that have products and services that will trim those costs and speed up the time to market, she said.

It’s not the first or even the second time cable operators have upgraded their networks to provide new, profitable services, and this latest upgrade promises to be just as lucrative as offering data and voice services have proved to be, Roulier said.

WIRELESS WORLD

Those front- and back-end upgrades to carriergrade status will also be necessary to compete effectively in a wireless world, which is where the worldwide communications industry is headed, noted Kelly Davis-Felner, vice president of marketing for the Wi-Fi Alliance, a global non-profit organization formed in 1999 to create ubiquitous standards and specifications for wireless-fidelity networks.

“For MSOs, [WiFi] is a foray into mobility and allows them to offer voice and data connectivity they haven’t been able to offer in the past,” Davis-Felner said. “It’s easy to envision the day when you don’t have to plug your device into anything.”

Cable, satellite and telco operators have been gathering data about their customers for decades, but results often fall short of expectations. These days, though, so-called big data analysis seems at least poised to create real operational efficiencies and improved customer care, big-data experts and cable operators said.

Up until recently, objections to using big data analytics seemed reasonable. Concerns over potential privacy infringement were among the biggest objections.

CONSUMERS LESS WARY

Making money on big data meant selling customer information to third parties, a practice that made subscribers even more leery of providing information. At the same time, overinflated promises and expectations dashed some operators’ enthusiasm to dive into the big-data pool.

But the technology has improved, and consumers are more willing to share information. Multichannel distributors, too, are becoming more adept at using big data to enhance customer care, improve operating efficiencies and add to the bottom line.

One of Canada’s largest multichannel pay distributors is using big data to determine where it can have the biggest impact on a customer’s experience, according to the director of consumer digital services at the unnamed MSO. The amount of data any company collects can be overwhelming, so this Canadian MSO has chosen to focus on specific customer-care areas. That means a lot data may remain in storage to be used later. But it also means present-day solutions are being crafted for present-day problems.

Most phone calls into care centers are still billing-related, so using big-data analytics to reduce those calls will not only make customers happier, it can also have a direct impact on the bottom line, Nibha Aggarwal, senior director of product marketing for Amdocs, said. In one case study conducted for Amdocs last year, an undisclosed wireless provider had a chronic problem of callers repeatedly asking for credits whenever their calls were dropped.

“The carrier found they could pre-emptively fix the problem by giving small credits to customers before they called in to the call center,” Aggarwal said. “That wireless provider saw a 40% drop in its call rates simply by communicating with those customers and saying, ‘Your call was dropped and you will not be charged.’

“We are also seeing increases in customer satisfaction with some multichannel distributors who are sending step-by-step videos and instructions via text or email to customers who are trying to self-install equipment,” Aggarwal added. “It is an example of helping educate the customer before they call into the call center to ask questions.”

In another case study involving an undisclosed operator, call volumes dropped 14% when the operator sent pre-emptive emails and text messages to customers who experienced onetime price hikes for such items as late charges, Aggrarwal said.

“By sending the emails before they call in, customers know what to expect and why. This company was spending millions of dollars every year giving out credits to customers,” Aggarwal said. “When they implemented this procedure, their credits dropped 12.5%. Using big data in this manner not only improves a customer’s experience, it reduces operating costs.”

SILOS A ROADBLOCK

One big hurdle that keeps big data from reaching its full potential is the hefty task of breaking down operational silos, experts said. It’s neither easy nor expensive.

But getting rid of those silos makes it easier to be proactive and helpful. For example, in the case of a TV service outage, it would be beneficial if customers in the affected area automatically received an email or text notification. That would reduce angry calls to the call center and reassure customers that their provider is on the case and working to fi x the problem. Advances in big-data technology are making this scenario easier to accomplish, but breaking down internal operational barriers and enabling communications between those business units is necessary to take full advantage of what big data has to offer.

Companies across multiple industries, including most telecommunications companies, are moving to break down those operational silos. Terms like “single customer view” or “customer 360” have been gaining traction in marketing circles for some time. Gartner Inc., an information technology research and consulting company, presents a annual summit on how to create a customer-centric organizational culture based on a companywide CRM strategy. And vendors such as Amdocs are working with operators to integrate those operational silos to improve efficiencies and customer satisfaction.

Meanwhile, balancing the benefits of big data with concerns over privacy is an issue that continues to require operators’ attention attention, the Canadian cable executive said. Companies like Google and Facebook have paved the way to help consumers feel less threatened by sharing their personal information. But minefields still exist, and operators must tread lightly to make sure consumers aren’t uncomfortable with the information their telecom providers have about them.

“When you use that big-data information in an impersonal way, it can have a negative impact,” the Canadian MSO executive said. “When a customer calls in to complain about his or her Internet speeds, it might not be the best time to upsell them at that moment even if it makes sense on paper to sell that bigger package to them.”

EARNING THE ‘RIGHT TO SELL’

He continued: “We have to earn the right to upsell or cross-sell our customers. We want to understand and fi x their problem first. We always bring it back to the human experience. Data collection is an issue people are increasingly concerned about and we have to earn the right to use that data.”

As multichannel distributors continue to build trust with their customers, they will use big data more to sell more services, the cable executive said. Operators can learn a lot from the fumbles, foibles and successes of companies like Google and Facebook. It’s one thing to learn from companies like Google when it comes to using big data effectively. It’s another to actually put those practices to use. To be sure, analyzing big data requires manpower and the skill sets needed to take advantage of those analytics are in high demand these days. Many colleges, including the University of California at Berkeley and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, are creating courses specializing in big data.

“It’s often hard to find the right people in this field,” the operator said. “Most people who deal with data are used tostructured analytics, and big data is not structured and it takes a different approach. We do a lot of internal training in the classroom and in the field, and we’re working with other companies to get ramped up in this space.”

“We are working in uncharted territory,” he said.

As consumers become more mobile and their product choices — and service providers — expand, cable companies must morph to meet those customer demands. WiFi and the growth of the mobile ecosystem; complexities in the commercial-services arena; and using big data and analytics to predict and solve problems before they reach customers are just some of the information-technology issues facing operators today. Multichannel News will explore these issues in depth each month. Each quarter, we will speak to industry leaders about the challenges and opportunities of using IT to better serve customers. Kevin Hart is chief technology officer of Cox Communications, which has long been known as a leader in customer service and is currently transitioning its business-services platform to better service its commercial customers. At the same time, the MSO is in the midst of a major digital transition program. Hart spoke about these challenges with MCN contributor K.C. Neel. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: What convinced Cox to converge engineering and IT?

Kevin Hart: We see the trend around convergence and the importance of making applications easy to use and personalizing those capabilities to benefit the customer experience. That takes the interface of both the software and the hardware sides to mine the classic functions of the CIO and the CTO. So, we combined that role a couple years ago. Specifically around the IP video-delivery systems, our goal is to continuously improve the customer experience at Cox; we’ve been known for that and we’re going to continue to focus on making the customer touch points easy to use within the IT ecosystem. Availability, reliability, scalability are the key components in terms of an IT network design and interface. We want to make it intuitive, easy to navigate, easy to understand, easy to integrate into other applications. We have also added a heavy dose of personalization embedded within our IP product.

MCN: What does that involve?

KH: There have been a lot of great advances in identity management, including single sign-on capability, so it’s really about understanding who the end user is, whether it’s a Mac address from a modem in the home or whether it’s tied to their logon account. We’re trying to personalize that experience based on previous use and also making recommendations based on themes and genres. That’s more of the intelligence side of the business.

Obviously, scaling the network is important to make sure we have a high-quality service for delivering the IP streams from the most convenient and local destination to make sure there is high quality and no latency in terms of the video quality. There is a lot of end-user design that goes into the software development interface, and then a lot of classic engineering and hardwareoptimization design to make sure that the quality of the network and the transportation of the bits are as efficient as possible.

MCN: Do you spend more of your time and money on software or hardware issues?

KH: There are complexities with both. There are some components that have been simplified and there are some components that are more complex. Because many of the hardware components encompass firmware or software embedded within that hardware, troubleshooting can be a little bit trickier from time to time in terms of trying to pinpoint root causes. But in general, we’re able to diagnose and troubleshoot and prevent issues more rapidly because of the software and the intelligence that we’re building into the networks.

MCN: What’s your biggest challenge with customer-experience issues as they relate to IT and the rollout of these new services?

KH: The IP technology, the hardware, the software, the plant and the ecosystem have been up and running with many of our IP platforms for a couple years now. So from a technology standpoint, we feel pretty good about where we’re going and where the road map is. The biggest challenge, I would say, is probably the interface of optimizing an existing network while rolling out a new network and then trying to provide great quality of service. It’s not so much the technology but just making sure our operational capabilities are solid.

MCN: How are you managing the increased usage of WiFi and broadband for video?

KH: We’ve been offering WiFi for many years for both residential and business customers. We’re involved with the WiFi Consortium in Connecticut, Virginia and Omaha, Neb. Recently, we launched in Arizona and soon in Las Vegas. And then we’ll be expanding to other markets as well. We’re extending our high-speed data network through the WiFi mobile experience.

It’s a big part of our go-to-market strategy and also a great benefit for our Cox high-speed data customers. You’ll probably see us expand our WiFi offerings even more so in the future. We’ll also offer more commercial-grade WiFi for our Cox business customers and then work with some of the long-haul carriers to provide them options down the road as well.

MCN: What do you have to do to make your WiFi networks commercial-grade, and how important is that?

KH: Very important. We always want to provide customers the best quality service based on the service offering. It comes down to access points and access-point design, making sure there’s good coverage for any particular region or density you’re trying to serve, and a lot of it is access-point placement based on traffic patterns. So we continue to monitor that. The backhaul network that connects the access point back to our backbone and back to the Internet is a key element of the commercial grade to make sure you have plenty of capacity on your physical network, which is the critical piece in becoming carrier-grade.

MCN: How have services like Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and other over-the-top service changed the demands of your customers and the products and services that you’re offering?

KH: In general, we love the fact that our customers are using their Cox IP Internet connection for all kinds of purposes, including streaming video from a multitude of different providers. The over-the-top video providers are a big part of the growth on the Internet and the usage, which makes our high-speed Internet connection valuable to our customers. It’s just different content that they enjoy, so there’s no conflict there. In fact, we’re building our network to handle initial over-the-top video because of the huge demand by our customers, and we also provide information like that through our services like Contour or other video products that we offer as well.

MCN: What are the biggest opportunities for Cox in using big data and analytics?

KH: We have a saying within Cox that we provide life’s most important connections for our customers. So whether that’s their video service, their high-speed data service or their voice service, providing instant connection is a thing that means the most to them. We rolled out Contour about a year ago, providing personalized recommendations based on an individual’s personal preferences. From a network perspective, for example, we’re constantly getting data analytics to understand whether or not there is network congestion. We can then make sure we deploy incremental network investment to reduce any contention on the network based on these analytics that were coming from a real-time perspective. It’s all about providing a personalization for our customers and all about providing a better quality service from a network perspective to our end customers.

MCN: How important is proactive care and how difficult is it to pull off?

KH: It’s very important and realistic. Working with some of our own development internally at Cox, but then also through CableLabs and with other MSOs, we’ve developed a series of different tools that can proactively detect various potential issues on the network we and can dispatch technicians in advance of customer impact and customer calls just based on signal loss. Full-band spectrum analyzers can detect potential trouble on a network. We can monitor that and proactively dispatch repair agents ahead of customer issues. And there will be more and more capabilities like that. You’ll see more and more proactive customer maintenance tools and techniques being deployed with Cox and with other MSOs in 2015.

MCN: Cox is in the process of transitioning to an all-digital platform. What does that entail and how is it going?

KH: We launched our all-digital product [in the first week of November]. Something unique about this is that we spent the last year or so partnering with customer-focus groups, interviewing real customers and really trying to understand the customer journey in terms of the conversion from analog to digital and really trying to simplify the customer experience. We made a lot of investment in customer self-service, being able to enter an order and place a drop shipment or an ATA to be delivered to the home with a self-install kit and to do all that from an ecommerce perspective over the web and have the order flow through and our provision.

We’re trying to take customer experience to the next level and I think we’re making some good strides with our recently launched alldigital product that we launched in Connecticut. So far we’ve done quite well with a 90% self-install rate and we’re getting good positive feedback from the customers so far.

MCN: When do you start transitioning the rest of your customers and how long will that take?

KH: We have plans to go market by market in 2015 and 2016 to really make sure that we can provide a great quality service through this transition on a market-by-market basis. It’s only been a few weeks, but we’re probably 10 times ahead of schedule in terms of the volume that we’ve expecting, so it’s going quite well. Perhaps we can accelerate over time, but it should play out over 2015 and 2016.

As residential customers continue to cut the cord, cable telecommunications firms are increasingly focusing their sights on commercial customers, offering broadband, video, voice, hosting and cloud-computing services that generate healthy margins and foster long-term relationships.

Initially, most operators had basically offered their triple-play services to small and midsized businesses. Today, the business-services segment has expanded into new products and is catering to bigger, national clients.

It’s profitable, too. Business clients typically spend more each month, with some spending as much as $1 million a year, Douglas Fantuzzi, vice president of operations support systems and network solutions, cable and satellite, at software and services vendor Amdocs, said.

STABLE, HIGH MARGINS

Commercial clients also offer stability, often signing multi-year contracts at profit margins higher than those for residential customers.

Revenue from No. 2 MSO Time Warner Cable’s commercial-services business more than doubled to $2.31 billion in 2013 from $1.11 billion in 2012, and now accounts for more than 10% of the company’s overall revenue, per Forbes.

Cox Communications, among the first operators to dive into the commercial-services pool more than a decade ago, is on track to generate $2 billion from the category by 2016, Steve Rowley, senior vice president of Cox Business, said. Today, it counts 330,000 commercial clients; about 80% of those are small businesses that account for 65% of the unit’s revenue.

Mediacom Communications, serving predominantly small and rural markets, has seen the internal rates of return from business services grow by more than 20% annually each of the last four years, Dan Templin, senior vice president of Mediacom Business and president, Mediacom Telephony, said.

Mediacom is working with local governments and economicdevelopment organizations in its service territory to deliver broadband services considered vital to their economies.

“Broadband today is like the railroads were 100 years ago,” Templin said. “Without it, towns die. We are all about public-private partnerships to make sure that connectivity exists in our rural communities.”

Central Iowa, for example, is increasingly attracting high-tech companies wanting to build informationtechnology facilities, call centers and data centers that require reliable, high-speed connectivity. Mediacom’s Gigabit+Fiber solution is an enticement those towns need to lure those businesses, Templin said.

Commercial services require a higher level of network reliability and customer service. Most MSOs are retooling and stabilizing their automation processes to handle the greater volume.

A recent survey conducted by website Heavy Reading for Amdocs found that operators need more tools to automate those procedures and monitor the complex order execution processes. Of the 50 operator entities surveyed, 44% said they aren’t satisfied with their current Operations System Support (OSS) solution and are willing to invest in a better one.

The most common order-related complaint from commercial customers is missed installation deadlines (47%). This creates a need for a unified orchestration process, Yosi Mor Yosef, marketing manager for Amdocs’s OSS division, said.

Being able to see where an order is in the process at any given time, and providing self-service capabilities for commercial customers, were rated the most important feature by 35% of respondents.

The wholesalecarrier business has perhaps the most significant upside potential, Amdocs’s Fantuzzi said. The need for backhaul services connecting small cells to fiber networks is increasing at breakneck speeds. A Real Wireless survey conducted in January found that 70% of mobile network operators are willing to use small-cell networks rolled out or owned by a third-party partner, such as a cable company.

Cox is deploying a new business-services platform — Atlas — to accommodate its growing commercial services business. Atlas has its own separate billing, installation and support staff as well as separate customer relationship management, order-entry and support staff, plus sales and tech support, Rowley said.

Two years in the making, Atlas has involved more than 100 people across every division.

EFFICIENCY EFFORT

“We are constantly trying to further automate our processes so we can fulfill orders more quickly,” Rowley said. “We have installed a new, scalable system that allows us to be more efficient on the front end and back end by standardizing processes and centralizing operational functions. And we have installed more diagnostics so we are smarter and proactive. It’s been a huge undertaking.”

WiFi’s signal is getting clearer.

The local-area wireless broadband technology already carries more Internet traffic to consumers’ smartphones and tablets, laptops and PCs than licensed wireless and wired connections combined, according to data from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

Earlier this month, the WiFi Alliance, a trade group that promotes the technology and certifies products for interoperability, unveiled a set of “Passpoint” certification features that enable WiFi networks to look and behave more like cellular networks (see “Cable Inches Toward ‘WiFi-First,’ ” Oct. 13, 2014).

ONE STEP CLOSER

Passpoint puts WiFi one step closer to becoming a carrier-grade network. This is important because if cable operators want to increase what they charge their residential and commercial customers, they will have to offer them reliable and seamless connectivity.

It’s a scenario similar to cable’s entry into the telephone business in the 1990s. Operators had to prove they could offer a service that was comparable to, and ultimately better than, what the incumbent telephone companies offered.

In May, the Federal Communications Commission made an additional 100 Megahertz of wireless spectrum in the 5-Gigahertz band available for unlicensed WiFi use. This gave carriers and MSOs some much-needed bandwidth to operate WiFi networks without interference and bottlenecks, according to Justin Colwell, CableLabs vice president of access network technologies.

More FCC auctions are expected, which will benefit cable operators wanting to expand their public and private WiFi offerings going forward. The majority of consumer phones and tablets can now live up to their potential with this new spectrum, Colwell said, so the ability to build a bigger and better wireless offering will serve as a value-added service to consumers.

The expansion and interconnection of wireless networks will also likely be a financial boon for operators, experts said.

It’s unclear just how much money can be generated with WiFi networks, but everyone seems to want get into the game. Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts extolled WiFi prospects in a presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media Communications and Entertainment conference in Los Angeles on Sept. 16.

“We have a tremendous asset in WiFi,” Roberts said. “Our relationship with our customers and the people who are not our customers understanding how great and powerful a WiFi connection can be … is a great thing for our company and our investment.”

In addition to its pledge to activate 8 million hotspots in its service territory by year’s end and joining with Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications in offering customers free access to 250,000 hotspots across the country, Comcast has been busy laying the groundwork for other partnerships.

The company is offering two Asian cellular operators access to its WiFi hotspots in the U.S. Customers of Japan’s KDDI and Taiwan Mobile can use Comcast’s Xfinity WiFi hotspots when they travel to the U.S., reducing the need for their subscribers to pay expensive international roaming charges.

INTERNATIONAL PACTS

Financial details of these deals have not been released, but the pacts serve as an example of the potential windfall WiFi offers to operators.

Comcast has also cut a peer-to-peer deal with Liberty Global whereby the European MSO’s customers can use Comcast’s WiFi free of charge when traveling in the U.S. and Comcast’s customers can use Liberty Global’s hotpsot WiFi services free when they travel in Europe. Right now, it’s a fair exchange of assets and Comcast executives declined to discuss the deal or its long-term implications for the company’s business strategy. But it is another sticky service designed to keep customers happy with and tied into their service.

Most U.S. WiFi users currently connect at home, CableLabs’s Colwell said. But that’s changing rapidly as consumers increasingly want to take their services with them as they venture outside. And operators want that, too.

Yet burgeoning use of cellular wireless Internet devices has created a logjam for providers, who are increasingly offloading their data traffic onto WiFi to alleviate the burden. A Cisco Systems study has predicted that 52% of all worldwide mobile traffic will be offloaded to WiFi by 2018; in the U.S., that number jumps to 64%.

The increase in mobile data traffic will likely result in new and unlikely partnerships and mergers, with cable operators sitting in the catbird seat, some observers have predicted.

“The time is coming when WiFi will shift from being a ‘secondary’ network to being a primary one,” MoffettNathanson partner and senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in an Oct. 6 research report on WiFi. “[I]nstead of thinking of WiFi as an alternative to cellular everywhere WiFi is available, we will instead to begin to think of cellular as a backup network needed only when WiFi is not.”

Some cable and cellular companies are already making money with WiFi services. Raleigh, N.C.-based Republic Wireless is offering a WiFi-first service starting at only $5 a month and other wireless providers, including T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, are prepping their own WiFifirst services as well. But some industry experts think cable-enabled WiFi will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling the spectrum and the dollars derived from offering the service to consumers and businesses.

While much has been made about consumer WiFi services, a big potential revenue generator for cable lies within the commercial sector. Comcast is already offering WiFi services in several public spaces in its service territory, including some subway stations in its hometown of Philadelphia, as well as in some shopping malls.

In Santa Clara, Calif., Comcast is handling the backhaul services for Levi’s Stadium, the new home field of the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers, with service costs offset by leveraging in-game experiences. Event attendees can order food or drinks and have them delivered to their seats — and receive marketing messages touting deals on goods sold at the stadium.

Bright House Networks recently activated free public WiFi in in downtown Tampa, Fla., as well as the area’s riverfront public parks. It’s free to the public for up to two hours a day or 1 Gb per month. BHN subscribers can access the service for free all of the time.

Once a non-BHN customer surpasses the free allocation, there is an option to purchase additional service.

The consumer side of the business is somewhat easy to implement, as dual private/public routers are deployed in millions of customers’ homes, CableLabs’ Colwell said. The business becomes a bit more complicated and expensive on the commercial side of the equation, though. There are things operators can do to mitigate costs using automated planning and project management solutions from such companies as Amdocs.

Moffett predicted the revenue that could be derived from both residential and commercial WiFi justifies costs. The fourth leg of the cable telecom industry’s stool would be complete.