By Jason Rupe, Ph.D., CableLabs

This paper presents a flexible but basic set of Markov and math models that allow estimation of availability, reliability, and operations costs for repair operations under various levels of plant degradation. As a result, these models can address several use cases that can help operators make decisions about how and whether to address certain operations problems.

We are motivated by several observations.

• Proactive network maintenance (PNM) is an advantage given to cable operators for managing operations expenses to target service reliability which results from the underlying technology, usually DOCSIS® networking. But many operators do not take full advantage of it.
• Addressing the root cause of a problem takes much more technician time, so comes at a cost; but there is a benefit to the overall plant condition as well. It is important to examine this tradeoff, like so many other tradeoffs related to operations costs.
• Operators can be under pressure to improve services, which drives deployment of new technologies; but it is difficult to know where and when to make these transitions, and operations impacts are difficult to quantify.

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