Charter Communications Success Story

Overview
Welcome to the Wired World.™
Interactive TV.
High Speed Internet.
Hollywood movies.
Digital music.
And much, much more.

Charter Communications, a Wired World™ company, is the nation’s fourth largest broadband communications company, currently serving some 7 million customers in 40 states. Charter provides a full range of advanced broadband services to the home, including cable television on an advanced digital video programming platform, high-speed Internet access, commercial high-speed data, video and Internet solutions. Charter has become the cable industry's preeminent customer service-oriented broadband company that implements Paul Allen's "Wired World" vision, by developing new technology, discovering creative and innovative ways to do things, improving the value of its services to its customers, and building strong relationships with its customers.

Charter Digital Cable offers its customers Charter iNDemand, a service that offers dozens of Pay-Per-View channels featuring touch of a button ordering. The promise is — watch the latest movie releases and exclusive special events such as championship boxing, the NBA, wrestling and today’s top artists in concert, all without leaving your chair. All one has to do is connect up to the on-screen Channel Banner and determine what is playing and when, and then, using your remote control switch, order your program.

Challenge
In the world of broadband communications, delivering what is promised is essential to establishing strong and loyal relationships with customers. When a customer orders Charter iNDemand, for example, there are definite expectations. A customer has the option of calling up minutes before a pay-per-view movie is to begin, order it and ease into their easy chair just in time for the opening credits. Instant gratification -- unless of course the movie started already. How is that possible? The set-top control box provided by the Charter Communications says there is one more minute before the movie is supposed to start. Time to call customer service and get your money back! And all because the clocks involved were not synchronized.

"This occurred when the head end office’s time was a minute or so slower than the satellite feed’s time," says Pragash Pillai, Staff Engineer, Charter Communications Corp. "Customers would rely on their set-top time only to find that the program had already started. The time and money in irate customer service calls, as well as the requests for refunds, could have easily been averted had there been synchronized time between the satellite receiver and the set-tops."

How this can happen is that a set-top box is attached to the television set and controlled through a coaxial cable that goes to a Charter Communications regional office. Each regional office serves a number of communities. It is at the regional office where the "head end" equipment is located. The head end is where there is a convergence of technology that enables a specific television set to receive programming from a satellite feed. The head end houses the satellite receiver and controls what goes to a set-top box and when. The head end also controls what time is displayed on the set top box, and this is where TymServe proved invaluable to Charter Communications.

Solution
"We needed to find a way to eliminate problems with Charter iNDemand Pay Per View service caused by having inaccurate time appear on the set-tops," Pragash continues. "We decided to deploy the TymServe network synchronization product because we found out that we needed to manually reset our head end controller clock so frequently (about twice a week) to make sure all the set-tops had the correct time. Using TymServe, the Charter Communications regional offices save money by averting unnecessary refunds and additional customer service complaints. By automatically synchronizing the time they also free up their engineers for other more purposeful work. We chose to go with the Symmetricom TymServe2100 after a detailed analysis of all of the major time server vendors, and based on the technical product features and cost we decided that the TymServe 2100 was the most attractive product."

Results
Charter Communications bought 20 TymServe units for 10 regional offices in 2000 and since that time has been introducing more of these automatic synchronized time units to other offices. The units have performed better than expected. "Most of the time I have visibility on each deployment, and I have not seen any surprises since we started deploying the units," says Pragash. "The TymServe 2100 performs as promised and as expected. It helps Charter to synchronize our head end equipment such as our satellite receivers and set-top controllers." And more than pays for itself in averted customer service calls and unwanted refunds.

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