Expect the expected: Teradyne adapts testing system for a new set of problems

The wave of data services that carriers are preparing themselves and their networks to deliver is bringing with it a new set of diagnostic and repair issues. As they adapt and expand their service bundles, carriers must confront those maintenance problems from the perspectives of both their networks and their personnel.

Teradyne has put its access network maintenance system through its own evolution in an attempt to address both sides of that issue. New components for the vendor's 4Tel II system are designed to help streamline the cost and complexity of network maintenance and make the customer contact point better able to deal with the new set of problems brought on by a change in the type of traffic being carried.

"We're shifting our skill set to the [Internet protocol] and Internet side," said Chris Bohrson, director of marketing for Teradyne.

The need for testing processes to address problems specific to the Internet is a product of traditionally voice-oriented carriers bundling data service with their voice options, said Frank Bauer, director of engineering at Teradyne.

"With the introduction of data and the merger of data and voice, problems are becoming much more complex," said Grant Cushny, product technologist at Teradyne.

New components built into 4Tel II are designed to help carriers deal with those complexities. For example, the system's AccessLink component collects physical measurements at nodes in the network and helps isolate faults in the access network to reduce the time and personnel it takes to identify problems.

Teradyne embraced expert systems technology-a series of reasoning scenarios based on historical data gathered from past experiences-for the ExpertLink component of 4Tel II. Essentially, 4Tel II taps into different knowledge-based expert systems and provides a guided interaction that prompts the CSR to ask certain questions or instruct callers to take certain steps (see figure). The system thendiagnoses the problem and makes a recommendation to the CSR, who can communicate the problem and its solution immediately to the customer.

That capability, in conjunction with 4Tel II's UserLink node, helps carriers manage the interaction between the network and the end user in a way that allows network operators to continue using existing support personnel without extensive retraining or, in the future, save capital by reducing the number of human positions required.

All the information exchanged through such a transaction can also be stored, so that if the problem reported requires a repair technician to be dispatched, the transaction data can be attached to the trouble ticket.

Dispatching engineers for network repair is costly no matter what the network medium or the services in question. Teradyne estimates a carrier's cost to be more than $100 per truck roll. GTE, which has deployed Teradyne's system nationally, first started looking for an answer to the dispatch problem several years ago, when approaching deregulation became a critical factor in managing customer service, especially to consumers.

"Technicians need to isolate problems quickly," said Melba Poole, manager of customer care advocacy at GTE. "We were looking to ways to improve our [problem] handling time, but we want to dispatch technicians only for significant network problems."

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