Siemens Subscriber Networks has come out with a handful of new residential products to help carriers more efficiently scale and add services on their “dumb” broadband connections.
At SUPERCOMM, the company introduced four new products as part of this new Broadband Plus! strategy. Patrick Fitzgerald, vice president of marketing for Siemens Subscriber Networks, says these products are among the first solutions of their kind to take advantage of nextgeneration DSL Forum device management specifications.
The SpeedStream Residential Gateway family of products includes a 802.11g gateway, ADSL2/ADSL2+ on the WAN side, HomePlug and HPNA technology. Ready for testing now, the gateway is list-priced for about $199. The company also has added the tango Awareness Module to its tango client software suite for installation and customer support. This new module lets service providers send screen pops to subscribers’ computers to alert them of new services available to them. Siemens Subscriber Networks has also entered a new product category with the introduction of its tango Subscriber Manager, a large database designed to help service providers keep inventory of CPE deployed in the field. Finally, the company’s new tango Service Delivery Manager acts as an extension to back-end server software. It adds intelligence to the network to enable service providers to do things like automate the distribution of new firmware loads to enduser devices. The delivery manager also ties into billing and customer care systems and service provider portal pages to help subscribers configure their home devices through an easy GUI.
This kind of tool is a requirement for service providers to control the multiple customer premises devices in their networks, says Fitzgerald, noting that Siemens is the North American leader in DSL CPE and has shipped more than 10 million units worldwide. A Chinese carrier Siemens has been talking with had 10 million units of CPE deployed, but had no way to remotely troubleshoot or inventory the large number of devices, he adds.
