FROM THE INDUSTRY
These automatic functions have key differentiation in that set up procedures for automatic level and slope control (ALSC) systems which were difficult to set have been completely made easy. Obviously other companies are doing it now, but we’ve had a lead of over 10 years of experience at it. We have got a few grey hairs doing a few things wrong and putting things right, but that experience is what’s given us great success in the US and Canada. We have continued to develop the functionality and have gone from auto set up to auto diagnostics using an AI (artificial intelligence) software solution which we call NeuronX TM . Has automating your processes been a large part of your success? Our biggest sell is not to the engineers, it’s to the field operations people, the people who actually have to install and maintain the network. In the US that’s often more involved as the equipment is mostly mounted on wire strands hung from utility poles, the telegraph poles, where there’s a guy in a bucket truck at 30 feet (or 10 metres) off the ground sometimes in horizontal rain or a snow storm sometimes at -40 degrees, installing and maintaining this equipment. That’s where they demand it. They just want equipment that you plug in quickly and it just works. do you see AI playing a part in the future? Absolutely. The reason why a lot of our customers were very reticent initially was because cables can get damaged, fibre cables can get kinks or get bent. Experienced engineers can recognise the characteristics of these faults with roll-offs, suck-outs or standing waves – sometimes these faults are very infrequent meaning only experienced technicians recognise these issues – this is where AI comes in.
Congratulations on your announcement. You must be delighted. We are. Last year was great for Technetix; we grew 33%, and our North American sales have grown significantly, supported by the acquisition 18 months ago of Lindsay Broadband. We have had several breakthroughs with tier-one operators, and we’ve now got to the point where 52% of our business is in the Americas now. Within the last three years we also acquired a company in Germany, ECAD, which got us into doing fibre optic passives and expanded our fibre connectivity products, but also doing German-style cable network equipment. To what do you attribute the company’s success? The company’s been going for 34 years. I’m a founder of Technetix. I was originally the CTO; it was started by three engineers. The success factor of Technetix I think is that we’ve not really changed our business model in all this time. We talk to customers, listen to their problems, come up with solutions then repeat. We develop all our access equipment. All the products we sell are our own design. That that’s what has given us the breakthrough in North America, because we came along with a unique solution for cable plant. In the old days and in many quarters they still have amplifiers and nodes with lots of plug-in equalisers and attenuators, which are tricky and very skilful to install and commission. But in 2010, listening to our largest customer in Europe, we developed an electronically controlled auto-setup equipment. We had great success across Europe with it, and over the last ten years with great supporters such as Liberty and Vodafone. When we took the idea to the Americas market the sense was: “This is very different. We’re not sure whether we want to go down this route, because it’s all electronic, is it all that reliable?” We conducted field trials, which worked well - things have begun to snowball over the last three or four years. Fast forward and these days smart amplifiers are the only acceptable solution and with it smart setup de-skills the commissioning and makes construction and network upgrades much easier and cheaper and ultimately, more productive.
“A lot of operators now have Wi-Fi hotspots, which is quite a good way to find your customers, because if a customer moves into a house, they want broadband, to switch on their laptop, find Wi-Fi, and they can then find the operation and pay to get hotspot access.”
Completely bent?
Well it still works, but it will suffer degraded performance, so therefore the outcome is a bit unpredictable over later months. With diagnostic capability built into the equipment, we’re employing AI, which effectively does the same thing as the network engineer’s brain and can see standing waves if there’s a bad
May 2024 Volume 46 No.2
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