Inside the War Room, Management system helps cable telephony make itself @Home >BY Chris Bucholtz, West Coast Bureau Chief

Nestled inside a modest industrial park building, the headquarters of @Home Network looks like your average Silicon Valley high-tech company: Dilbert-style cubicles, fluorescent lighting and picture windows that overlook a freeway on-ramp.

But in the center of the building is a room straight out of a Cold War thriller. A darkened chamber houses desks for a dozen workers, who react with great urgency to changes on a 6-by-25-foot map projected on the wall.

This is @Home's network operations center (NOC), affectionately referred to as the "War Room" by Milo Medin, the company's vice president of network management. From this room, @Home's network managers can view color-coded icons on a map representing the nodes and modems in the company's projects in Sunnyvale and Fremont, Calif.

Using information relayed from the cable modems in subscribers' homes, the network's element management system (currently Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, soon to be replaced with a NetExpert framework from Objective Systems Integrators) compares network monitoring information with a management information database that lists all possible alarms.

If a problem arises, the modem sends an appropriate signal over the cable network to the NOC, where it is compared with the database to generate an alarm. The system can detect problems at a single household or correlate multiple alarms for bigger failures.

"The elements we key on are smart elements," said Charles Lanman, an account manager for OSI who's been working on @Home's NOC project since its inception.

"The modems can relay really small indications," Lanman said. "They tell you whether the problem is in the modem itself or in a router, and they can predict failures."

This network management system-which will be expanded as @Home adds affiliate cable multiple systems operators across the nation-allows @Home's NOC staff to detect problems as they happen (and, in some cases, anticipate them). The NOC can then notify staff at individual cable TV companies of problems, providing a proactive way for cable companies to ensure continuous service.

"You have to have a little sympathy for the cable operators because their end devices are really stupid," said Medin. "Their method of reporting is when the customer picks up the phone and yells. The cable operators honestly want to offer good service, but they've never had a real-time way of doing it."

This real-time management capability could help @Home reward its cable MSO partners with a dividend. Such a system could be the first step in helping cable operators overcome their reputation for poor service.

"Availability of our network is obviously a vital issue to us," said Medin. "But creating a system like this helps solve problems for us and the cable companies at the same time."

Analysts have pointed to the low level of satisfaction with customer service as the main reason cable operators stood little chance of competing with traditional carriers, but a management solution similar to that of traditional telephony holds promise.

"It certainly is different than pumping 85 channels one way and sending a bill at the end of the month," said Eileen Healy, president of Pleasanton, Calif.-based consultancy Healy & Co. "[The purpose of] the cable industry's management system now is just to make sure the signal is pumping and hope the customers never call."

With the @Home management system, Medin said, one of the key refinements will be finding ways for the cable company to avoid calling its customers. "Right now, if a customer shuts off his or her modem, we get an alarm that says there's no power to the device," Medin said.

"We don't want the cable companies to have to call up Mrs. Macgillicuddy every time and ask her, 'Ma'am, is your modem powered up?' The new software should take care of that for us," he said.