I just had a conversation with my colleague Gary Nilsen who had flown down from Chicago to supervise change out of the VOD system in Evansville. Gary supervises our technical video infrastructure for the entire company in a Vice President level capacity, and has personally engineered most of the video infrastructure presently in use within WOW! He was shaking his head, and knowing my friend as I do, I knew he wasn’t having a good day.
The change out of the VOD system was scheduled tonight (03/22/10) within the maintenance window–a major project involving a number of his team and a number of vendors as well. After all was set up, one of the vendors called with a potentially show-stopping issue that they had discovered. This happened after months of planning and making sure that all the details were worked out.
What necessitates an equipment change out? In this case, our current Evansville VOD system is not malfunctioning or unable to deliver product. It is, however, not a consistent customer interface with our other markets, and this factor alone was deemed important enough to spend a substantial 6 figure sum to ensure a better customer experience with VOD.
In fact, usually it is the customer experience that drives technology change. Most of our carrier class equipment is quite reliable–it has to be to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our telephony switches for example have redundant systems to ensure availability of voice services at a 99.999% uptime. Even when equipment must be changed out, redundant systems handle call processing and completion while primary systems are updated or repaired. What that means is that a customer should never experience a call failure unless there is a plant issue (tree falling on line, semi truck hitting utility pole, squirrels chewing through a fiber optic cable–all of these things actually happen more often than you’d think!)
So while there are occasions that true obsolescence or malfunction dictates new technology engineering and installation, it is usually driven by the team’s desire to build a better experience for the customer. This is consistent with our basic philosophy at WOW! and how we feel about the importance of the customer experience. We hope that you sense those “behind the scenes” efforts by a dedicated engineering team.
Until next time….
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