Highlight aims to tame unruly broadband connections after Ofcom’s push to improve UK broadband services

Martin Saunders of Highlight

Highlight has introduced Broadband Clarity, which it describes as an advanced service assurance feature that delivers visibility and alerting on the speed and stability of broadband connections.

The launch comes hot on the heels of UK regulator, Ofcom’s commitment to improve broadband services. From March 2019, a new voluntary code of conduct compels service providers to give minimum speed guarantees and inform customers of predicted broadband speeds before they buy.

Highlight’s new Broadband Clarity brings discipline to unruly broadband connections so service providers and their customers can identify slow lines, resolve issues quickly and offer meaningful speed guarantees. Highlight delivers a clear representation of how each line is performing with a graph showing how speed has changed over time.

Martin Saunders, product director at Highlight says, “Our partners describe managing broadband connections as trying to tame a wild animal. Few broadband connections are ever monitored, even by larger businesses, since traditional tools are not designed for the differing characteristics and speeds of broadband lines.”

“These old-style monitoring tools may spot complete outages but will miss lines that are occasionally unstable or drop below contractual speeds. The result is either far too many false positive alerts, making it a chaotic and expensive support issue, or too few alerts, missing critical speed related issues.

“Broadband Clarity gives full visibility into broadband connections so providers can manage the lines effectively. They can now differentiate themselves in a crowded market by giving customers the guarantees necessary to comply with Ofcom’s latest code of conduct,” he adds.

For service providers with thousands of broadband connections, Highlight’s advanced thresholding engine learns the stable speed for each individual line and automatically applies an appropriate low speed threshold. Alerts sensitivity is configurable to ensure the smallest number of false positives. This unique ability to dynamically auto-detect line speeds and adjust the sensitivity of alerts makes Highlight the only service assurance tool on the market able to meet the challenge of managing thousands of broadband connections effectively.

Highlight’s intuitive, easy to understand reports, are designed to be accessible to technical teams as well as for use by service and customer account managers. With full multi-tenancy support, service providers can give customers direct logins to Highlight so they can view their entire IT estates, with detailed information on broadband services. And for customers that turn their broadband connections off at night, rather than creating more alerts, Highlight’s alerting engine and alert filters can be adjusted to report only during business hours.

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