After some of our colleagues enjoyed their well-deserved summer holiday (often in form of sports activity) in the last weeks, the development process now speeds up again.
You can already see that on our demo system where we integrated a long desired feature called Proactive Network Maintenance (or PNM in short). Most of you will have heard of it. With that you can search proactively for sources of distortion before the customer realizes a dropped service quality. Therefore we display heatmaps marking potential regions where impairments are likely situated.
We use the upstream microreflection measurements of the customers cable modems for that. Microreflections occure when the emitted signal hits an impedance mismatch e.g. because of a loose connection, a kink or water in the cable, etc. Then the signal is reflected with reduced power level and interferes the following emitted signal. As the modem measures the time delay and power of the reflected signal it’s possible to derive the distance to the impairment. Drawing circles with this radius around the affected modems leads to overlapping regions with higher and lower probabilities of potential defective infrastructure equipment.
For those who want to see the exact preequalization values of the modems, we added a new tab on the modem analysis page where you can see the energy in the single taps and the exact distance where the microreflection occurs from.
The feature will be available within the next version. Unfortunately there’s no release date yet, but the functionality is currently already in testing at one of our paying ISPs.