The Challenge: Providing Premium Broadband Services
With over 400,000 delivery points, Altibox is the largest fiber broadband service provider in Norway. For six consecutive years, they have been named with the most satisfied broadband and IPTV customers - a rarity for service providers in the Nordic region.
That sort of best-in-class product quality doesn’t come easy, however. “What we’ve done cannot be accomplished without a massive amount of testing,” said Ragnar Anfinsen, Chief Architect of CPE at Altibox. “My team handles anything that does routing, switching or Wi-Fi in the home. Currently we are participating in four different projects bringing forth CPE in parallel. That includes our industry leading residential FTTH CPE, which uses different chipsets for 4x4 MU-MIMO 5GHz and 2.4 GHz 2x2 802.11n. Additionally we are bringing forward a new Wireless Access Point with the same Wi-Fi technology, but other chipset vendors. Simultaneously we are developing new firmware to our existing CPE’s, which also need testing. Last but not least, we are also introducing a new Small Business CPE.”
“Needless to say, there is a lot of testing going on for the time being,” said Ragnar, “We needed something comprehensive in number of tests, standards covered, and in repeatability.”
"TO OUR SURPRISE WE ENDED UP SPENDING THE TIME SAVED BY CDROUTER ON EXTENDING THE OTHER TESTS WE HAVE BY TEN FOLD, WHICH MEANS EVEN GREATER LEVEL OF CONFIDENCE." - Ragnar Anfinsen, Chief Architect of CPE at Altibox
The Solution: CDRouter’s Comprehensive Test Platform for Broadband CPE
Having used CDRouter before, Ole Jørgensen, Senior Network Engineer and System Developer, knew it was the industry standard and up to the task. “The number of tests and the span of the standards is really comprehensive,” said Ole. “Beyond that, I think the best feature is actually the ability to customize and extend CDRouter. We’ve integrated it with our own tools that do things like configure the CPE for a specific test run. We also enjoy the repeated tests with CDRouter Performance and configuration testing together, which can prove performance degradation over time.”
“It’s also very easy to use,” said Ole. “I hate to use the word ‘plug-and-play’, but if you understand the basic concepts of what you need to test, CDRouter is both flexible and straightforward. And the automation is key. We constantly run closed loop testing spanning most of the modules. When it’s not busy testing something specific it’s running performance in loop.”
“To our surprise we ended up spending the time saved by CDRouter on extending the other tests we have by ten fold, which means even greater level of confidence.”
World-Class Testing and Support Helps Build World-Class Products
“On top of all that, the support is great,” said Ole. “On many occasions we have requested remote assistance, and it has been given without question. I wish all providers had this focus on customer satisfaction.”
“Testing on such low level a CDRouter provides, e.g. looking at each bit in a DHCP request is something we would never had done manually,” said Ragnard. “It is just too complicated and time consuming. CDRouter provides many thousand tests that we would probably never had done. This is one of the primary reasons for investing in CDRouter.”
“Our customers expect every detail to be nailed, from the packaging of the hardware to performance,” said Ole. “And that’s a good thing - our customers should not be expected to debug our CPEs. CDRouter gave us a new level of confidence and freed up significant time to focus on integration and third party compatibility.”
“CDRouter perfectly filled the gap in our need for compliance, regression and interoperability testing - which should be at the core of any serious internet service provider.”
