Smart Cloud Platform: Wi-Fi in Hands, Experience in Mind

Mesh Wi-Fi has now become the dominant choice for home users. Managing home network devices efficiently from a remote location and monitoring the quality of home Wi-Fi has emerged as a new challenge for operators. To address this, ZTE has launched the smart cloud platform (SCP), the industry’s first integrated management platform. Designed to align with the development trends and management characteristics of customer premises equipment (CPE), SCP empowers operators to visualize and control home Wi-Fi networks, enhancing the quality of home Wi-Fi experience. Its rich functionalities offer substantial value to various departments within the operator, assisting the O&M department in enhancing operational efficiency, the marketing department in increasing revenue generation, and the  provisioning department in improving installation efficiency.

Enabling Remote Home Network Management: Transitioning from “Black Box” to Visible and Manageable Operations

The ZTE SCP is the industry’s first integrated platform that can manage mesh access points (APs), IP cameras (IPCs), and fiber to the room (FTTR) devices simultaneously. Based on ZTE’s flexible and open-source TECS cloud foundation (TCF), SCP supports interactions with managed devices through protocols like MQTT, WebSocket, TR-069, and TR-157 BDC. Combined with AI and big data analysis technologies, it enables remote visual configuration management of home networks. It provides real-time insights into the current and historical performance of home networks, transforming operational management from a “black box” into a visible and manageable system (Fig. 1).

Opex Savings: Rapid Fault Handling with Abundant NBIs and Third-Party Device Management via Open SBIs

For the O&M department of the operator, SCP possesses leading capabilities in Wi-Fi network analysis and diagnosis and offers a wide range of northbound interfaces (NBIs) and southbound interfaces (SBIs). It allows engineers to quickly locate faults in home networks based on various factors, such as interference, coverage, connectivity, site, and device. It also supports solving some faults remotely with the click of a button.

• Abundant NBIs for rapid fault handling: SCP provides a variety of NBIs to connect with operators’ existing operation support systems (OSSs), enabling call center agents to handle faults online. When a user contacts the call center to report a fault, an agent can quickly follow the procedure described in the operation guide to locate and resolve the fault. This reduces the need for engineer visits and boosts user satisfaction.
• Open SBIs for connecting with third-party devices: SCP offers open SBIs that are friendly to devices from third-party vendors, and also allows management of third-party devices through plugins. This enables devices from multiple vendors to be managed on a single platform, enhancing user experience and reducing operators’ CAPEX and OPEX.

Leveraging Precision Marketing Reports and Service Identification and Acceleration Features for Profit and Revenue Growth

For the marketing department of the operator, SCP provides precision marketing reports as well as service identification and acceleration features, which can be packaged separately to generate profit and increase revenue.

• The precision marketing reports help marketing personnel discover high-value users that can be targeted for broadband package upgrades and mesh AP sales. SCP can conduct deep analysis, produce various reports, and give suggestions that help marketing personnel recommend bandwidth upgrade packages, mesh AP purchases, gaming acceleration bundles, and more.
• The service identification and acceleration features can be sold as separate packages to achieve profit and increase revenue. SCP provides flexible and fine-grained parental controls to intelligently identify and analyze age-inappropriate websites and apps accessed by children to ensure healthy Internet use for kids. Additionally, SCP can employ deep packet inspection (DPI) plugins and QoS policies to accelerate services, thereby boosting the sales of livestreaming, video, and gaming acceleration packages.

Enhancing Efficiency: ZLife User App for Self-Installation and ZLife Provisioning App for Intelligent Acceptance

For the provisioning department of the operator, SCP provides a user version of the ZLife app for end users and a provisioning version of the app for engineers. The user app supports functions like home network topology visualization, Wi-Fi configuration, parental controls, network optimization, and network speed testing to help users manage their home networks. The ZLife provisioning app supports overall topology visualization, segment-by-segment speed testing, intelligent acceptance, and one-click diagnosis to help provisioning engineers conduct intelligent installations.

• Engineers can connect the ZLife provisioning app to the work order system to implement intelligent acceptance tests, thus improving installation efficiency and reducing OPEX.
• End users can use the ZLife user app to install mesh APs by themselves, which greatly enhances the user experience because the procedure is simple and eliminates the need to wait for engineer visits.

Conclusion

The ZTE SCP is a unified, high-performance, and open intelligent management cloud platform that empowers operators to remotely and visually manage home Wi-Fi networks, enhancing O&M and installation efficiency while ensuring a perceptible and dependable user experience. It also boasts industry-leading capabilities in Wi-Fi network analysis and diagnosis and provides rich reporting functionalities to help operators carry out precision marketing and increase revenue and ARPU.

ZTE has over two decades of experience in and a deep understanding of the home networking field. Leveraging its extensive expertise in CPE products, ZTE has developed SCP to help operators manage home networks more effectively. Going forward, ZTE will continue to introduce innovative features to SCP to help operators enhance the competitiveness of their network services and expand their markets.