As a recent Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) white paper explains in detail virtual Residential Gateways (vRGW) just make sense for operators. Some recent Bell Labs (News - Alert) numbers tell the tale.
Realities are as noted in a recent blog post, Virtual home gateways improve customer experience, by Alan Marks, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions, that fixed line operators show a 24 percent operational savings in fulfillment and assurance costs over a five year period with the use of vRGWs. In addition, Bell Labs modeling also shows a 31 percent increase in revenue for new services as a result of the faster time to revenue enabled by vRGWs, an improved customer experience and reduced churn by roughly 10 percent. At the same time, it saves 35 percent in ongoing subscriber acquisition costs.
“By distributing specific networking and service functions currently implemented in the home gateway and moving these functions into the network cloud, the vRGW can accelerate time to market while also delivering operational efficiencies,” noted Rudy Hoebeke, vice president of product management for IP Routing at Alcatel-Lucent in another TechZine posting on the subject.
Virtual home gateways benefit operators in three primary ways.
- Helping with service innovation and velocity
- Improving operational efficiencies,
- Lowering the total cost of ownership
Virtualized residential gateways bring greatly improved troubleshooting and fault resolution because operators have complete visibility into all devices on the home LAN. Along with this comes:
- More granular policy application
- Better traffic steering
- Home LAN extension into the operator’s network
In terms of operational efficiency, cloud-hosted home gateway functions are easier to manage than decentralized deployment models, according to Hoebeke. Providers benefit from a single, simplified device deployment option for different services.
Total cost of ownership also is lower because virtual residential gateways cut down on the cost of installation and commissioning, help desk, truck rolls, and CAPEX-related costs such as hardware replacement.
“By supporting faster time to market and innovative services while lowering capital and operational expenses,” noted Hoebeke, “service providers can achieve a real competitive advantage through residential gateway virtualization.”
As the authors conclude, the virtual residential gateway really does just make sense. In fact, if you would like to hear and see more a webinar, Improving the Customer Experience with Virtual Home Gateways, is 60 minutes that are very insightful.
Edited by Peter Bernstein