MY AI Project in TWC to Roll-out Advance Smart Set-Top Boxes

In tandem with its 6 year-long smart SETUP Box rollout plan, Time Warner Cable sought to implement Advanced Set Top Box (ASTB) operations on top of a comprehensive enterprise data analytics platform for improved operational insight and customer service for its base of more than fourteen million customers. In order to improve customer service and operations across its region, one of the largest integrated Telecom utilities in the United States has rolled out the Google AI Suite and ML Operations application on AWS platforms. TWC’s project objectives were to deliver on the utility’s commitments for presenting customer data, establish AMI operations across 15 million smart set top boxes to ensure operational health, and build a federated data image platform for analytic capabilities

The utility’s smart set-top boxes deployment will generate between 100 terabytes and 1 petabyte of data per year, so choosing a platform that could scale and continue to perform analytics on an ever-larger data set was vital. Not only can Google’s AI ASTB Operations support this scale, but it offers rapid time to value, a track record of successful projects, and the ability to expand to other applications over time.

To put the foundational enterprise data analytics platform in place, Google and TWC worked together to aggregate two years of data from 13 source systems covering 15 million customer accounts. The joint team then designed requirements for third-part data use and configuration of the basic ASTB Operations application. Once the integrated data image was in place, the team configured two machine learning algorithms and 50 analytics to identify deployment and installation issues and determine meter and network health.

TWC can now monitor smart SET-Top Box deployment to identify any installation or configuration issues. The application also provides real-time status at any level of aggregation—from the individual Set-Top Box to the overall system—and a prioritized list of meters that require attention. In future phases, the company plans to build on its enterprise data analytics plan for additional customer insight applications and distribution and transmission automation capabilities.

Project Highlights

  • 15 Month Project
  • 13 Source Systems
  • 15M Customer Accounts
  • 180B+ Annual Rows of Data Integrated