ZENIC ONE 2.0: Building an E2E FTTx O&M System

End-to-end (E2E) management and O&M of FTTx networks is the key to ensuring the smooth operation of the entire network system. This includes the whole processes from planning, construction and maintenance to optimization, enabling operators to implement precision marketing. Only a unified platform can improve O&M efficiency, optimize information systems, improve network quality, and further improve the service experience.

The O&M process involves many aspects, with fault processing being the most important. Statistics shows that home network faults account for 59%, access network faults account for 28%, and content source faults account for 13% of the total. During FTTx O&M, isolated systems face many challenges. Firstly, the faults are widely distributed across different segments, and only the E2E system can accurately locate the faults. Secondly, there are many types of faults, resulting in time-consuming processing. Implementing E2E comprehensive analysis, efficient compression, and correlation analysis can improve the efficiency. Finally, the alarm information is often scattered. Only a unified platform supporting information sharing can realize E2E system optimization, improve network quality and enhance the service experience.

To meet market demands, ZTE has developed the ZENIC ONE 2.0, an E2E management system based on a unified PaaS platform. This system integrates multiple systems, including the CO-end management, control and analysis system ZENIC ONE, the CPE management cloud platform SCP, and the home broadband service perception analysis system CEM, to enable cross-domain interoperability. The function modules on the ZENIC ONE 2.0 can be combined or separated to implement on-demand flexible deployment.

The ZENIC ONE 2.0 E2E system (Fig. 1) not only manages OLTs, ODNs and home networks to implement E2E management at the network layer but also pays attention to user service experience and provides user experience management.

During the O&M process, the ZENIC ONE system provides corresponding functions in all four stages of maintenance, optimization, marketing and planning, aiding operators in achieving autonomous network. Below, the functions in the areas of maintenance, optimization, marketing, and planning are described in detail.

E2E Display for Enhanced Maintenance

• E2E network topology display to enable manageable networks: The ZENIC ONE system supports E2E network topology display of the access network, enabling visual management of the entire network. This includes visualization of user service, highlighting service quality and low QoE occurrence. It also includes visualization of the home network with clear display of parameters and connection quality, and visualization of service links using different colors to indicate real-time service connection status. Additionally, it provides visualization of ODN where data is automatically uploaded after the QR scanning based on the pre-connectorized solution. The dumb fiber resources are displayed on the map with 100% accuracy to depict the entire network topology.
• E2E precise and fast fault location: Real-time E2E fault diagnosis and accurate fault locating are crucial. The ZENIC ONE 2.0 system implements intelligent E2E fault diagnosis on all the paths. When a video is lagging or frozen, it first creates a network topology profile and identifies the topology lines level by level to determine the termination node of the fault. It then checks the device status and alarm information of the faulty topology node to quickly identify the cause of the user service fault and restores the fault according to the actual cause.
• E2E accurate discovery of low QoE users for timely improvement: The ZENIC ONE 2.0 system actively identifies low QoE users, and pinpoints the root causes. It makes a comprehensive analysis of videos, web pages, games, emails, instant messages, and upload/download services, performs E2E diagnosis for low QoE users, and quickly identifies and locates the root causes. At present, the system achieves an 85% accuracy rate of identifying low QoE user and reduces the time for locating root causes to 10 minutes.

In the case of China Mobile Yili, the system helped the operator reduce the user complaint rate from 2.5% to 0.41%, improving the user satisfaction, and reduce the low QoE root cause locating time, improving the O&M efficiency.

E2E Analysis for Faster Optimization

• PON Optimization

For PON networks, the ZENIC ONE 2.0 system supports second-level data collection, ensuring a more accurate reflection of network details. The platform guides the uplink port expansion by analyzing the peak bandwidth on the uplink port and facilitates PON port upgrades by analyzing the traffic on the PON port. Furthermore, the system can identify high-value users to proactively recommend value-added service packages by analyzing the uplink port traffic of users.

• Home Network Optimization

Optimizing the home network can directly and effectively improve user satisfaction. In densely populated areas, after the initial installation of a batch of devices, the system can perform periodic and continuous channel optimization to reduce Wi-Fi channel interference. Using the home channel tuning function, the platform collects and analyzes relevant information to continuously tune the channel, enabling users to enjoy an increasingly better Wi-Fi experience.

• Content Source Optimization

The ZENIC ONE 2.0 system analyzes content sources, encompassing access users and access traffic, and presents the findings through graphs. It provides a detailed list of the service quality of each content source, enabling operators to gain a comprehensive understanding of the content source quality. A content source with a low score is identified as a low QoE content source. The system generates a list of low QoE content sources, accentuating the low QoE indicators, to aid operators in optimizing content sources.

Utilizing AI for Enhanced Precision Marketing

The ZENIC ONE 2.0 system introduces a new way of marketing — precision marketing. The customer experience management subsystem within the system collects and extracts data from the built-in blade server, enabling the generation of multi-dimensional configuration files. Meanwhile, these multi-dimensional user files can be integrated with other service data to form user profiles. This empowers operators to execute precision marketing based on home terminals, packages, and membership, preventing customer churn.

In fact, with the continuous optimization of the AI algorithm, operators can make comprehensive user analysis and recommend customized packages. This not only saves marketing costs but also significantly increases sales efficiency. For instance, home Wi-Fi can be recommended for users with poor network coverage, game acceleration services for online gamers, livestream acceleration services for Internet celebrities. In recent years, the ZENIC ONE 2.0 has helped China Unicom and China Mobile achieve remarkable results in precision marketing and customer satisfaction improvement.  

Traffic Analysis for More Efficient Planning

The ZENIC ONE 2.0 system provides expansion or service planning suggestions through analysis and calculation based on existing network resources and traffic. If the uplink or downlink peak bandwidth usage of the uplink port and PON port exceeds 70%, it suggests expanding the capacity of the OLT or PON port. It can identify the key areas for business development by analyzing the concurrent installation rate of ONTs and STBs, as well as plan key user development areas by analyzing the number of connected users.

The system can also analyze the average video service traffic of users in different areas to support the expansion of self-operated STB services, and plan the STB service development according to the concurrent installation rates of different terminals in specific areas.

Summary

The ZENIC ONE 2.0 E2E system not only covers the entire FTTx network, providing management and network analysis functions for OLTs, visual topology for dumb ODN resources, and remote tuning function for home networks, but also focuses on user experience and identifies low QoE users through E2E service analysis to prevent potential risks and actively improve user experience.

The system provides full support for operators during the whole process of “maintenance, optimization, marketing, and planning”. It a powerful tool for the operators’ autonomous network development and can effectively promote their revenue growth. Having been fully verified and acknowledged by China Mobile, the ZENIC ONE 2.0 will help more operators worldwide to implement E2E management of FTTx network.