Customer Overview
Summit Broadband connects people with technology to improve their lives at home, at work, and at play. As a leading fiber-optic telecommunications provider, Summit delivers high-speed Internet, TV, and phone services to residential and business customers, as well as Ethernet and dark-fiber transport for enterprise and wholesale clients.
summitfiber.com
The Challenge
Summit Broadband sought to leverage specialized technical expertise and expand network visibility while managing competing internal priorities. To achieve this, Summit partnered with LightRiver through the flexOPS model—gaining a trusted partner with intimate knowledge of their network, capable of supporting operations in varying capacities. The Network Operations Center (NOC) was consumed by thousands of nuisance alarms, which distracted teams from identifying and responding optimally to critical issues. As a result:
- Critical network health alarms were at risk of being missed
- Alarm patterns and trends could not be quickly identified and addressed
- Delays in monitoring led to delayed software upgrades
- Troubleshooting was largely reactive rather than proactive
Overall, the volume and lack of prioritization of alarms reduced operational efficiency and exacerbated service-impacting outages.
LightRiver’s flexOPS Tailored Solution
LightRiver delivered a tailored flexOPS engagement, combining specialized engineering expertise with advanced software-enabled network intelligence. The flexOPS solution for Summit included:
- Annual network health assessments with full network audits and recommendations
- Monthly reporting with actionable network insights
- Dedicated engineering hours for ongoing network optimization
- Remote and in-field engineering support to remediate network deficiencies
- Software-Enabled Network Intelligence
- Card Utilization Reports
- Wavelength Utilization Reports
- Wavelength Carrier Service Reports
- Wavelength Usage Matrix
This software-enabled network intelligence delivers clearer visibility into network performance, capacity utilization, and potential risk areas.
Results
Throughout the flexOPS engagement, performance monitoring, alarm trends and affected sites, and outstanding critical alarms were tracked and reviewed weekly with the Summit team. From each review, LightRiver and Summit set priorities and developed a collaborative resolution plan.
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Key Operational Improvements
- Improved network stability through early identification of failure patterns
- Proactive network planning informed by alarm trending and utilization data
- Faster and more accurate trouble isolation
- Replaced power card and fan modules reduced the risk of node outage
- Reduced alarm count by 80% allowing the NOC to focus on true critical events
Additional Insights
- NOCs typically see individual alarms but lack visibility into recurring patterns; flexOPS provided this missing context. For example, repeated alarm activity was observed at 8–10 sites each week, prompting remediation recommendations such as clearing the nuisance alarms that make up over 70% of their listed alarms and cleaning up various optical items that are causing Loss of Association.
- flexOPS managed services contributed in reducing trouble tickets at Summit Broadband by 18% YOY—driven by improved network visibility and proactive suppression of non-critical alarms that keep NOC teams focused on what matters.
By combining expert analysis and software enabled network intelligence, the flexOPS engagement assisted with transforming Summit’s network operations from reactive to proactive—reducing risk, improving visibility, and enabling faster resolution of network issues.