Easy and cost-effective service provisioning is a crucial part of the Profiber approach. It’s crucial because the basis of this utility-broadband model is that Profiber does not provide many real services itself – essentially just the fiber connection and the underlying broadband connectivity. So there has to be a foolproof way for customers (both residential and business) and third-party service providers to find each other and communicate – a sort of telecom dating agency – and for service providers to interact with Profiber itself to set up customers’ services. And it needs to be cheap for Profiber to run, because much of its income will be derived indirectly from revenue sharing with service providers.

Profiber’s only direct revenues come from providing basic fiber connectivity (about €13 per month residential subscription) and, if the subscriber takes them, from its own Internet service (about €20 per month including fiber connectivity for 1 Mbit/s, €40 for 10 Mbit/s, and €80 for 20 Mbit/s – the latter two including some extra bundled products). Currently, fiber connection and installation are free, but they will later be charged at €600 (US$770).

Customers will also need a router, which they can buy for €100 or rent for €5 per month, unless they opt for the 20-Mbit/s connection where the router is part of the bundle. A set-top box is included when broadband TV is ordered, and additional set-top boxes can be rented or bought.

Business subscribers have a different pricing model and are charged for any trenching and civil works (residential subscribers are not); they also have further types of product available, including QOS.

Service provisioning uses a self-service multichannel Web portal developed by Capernow A/S , as illustrated on the left of Figure 4. The basic functions of the portal are order handling including digitizing of workprocesses, trouble ticketing and customer relationship management (CRM) including a presales planning and execution module.

“If we didn’t do it like this, we would have a lot of people involved in provisioning,” says Profibers’s Rahbek. “We intend to have about 10 to 15 people – if we had not done it this way, we would have had about 100 people. So a lot of money is involved in having the right solution.”

A second, crucial system lies behind the Capernow portal, with which it interacts. This is the information broker from Unisys Corp. (NYSE: UIS ), which provides and controls the equal-access interface (EAI) between the business support system (BSS) and the various operations support systems (OSSs) – for example, network engineering or the Triple Play Service Provisioning System from NetCracker Technology Corp.

Link: http://profiber.dk