To ensure that we continue providing your customers with the best broadband they can get, we’re upgrading the software in our copper ISAMs. 

What's happening?

We have a copper ISAM network consisting of approximately 7,500 ISAMs serving over 1.1 million broadband and baseband IP customers. It also supports business services such as HSNS Lite. As part of our normal network lifecycle, we're upgrading these nodes with the latest software.

Besides continuing support of our copper ISAM network, this upgrade lets us subsequently introduce hardware that significantly improves broadband for many (especially remote) customers. Such hardware includes new VDSL2 linecards with vectoring capability to support performance improvements. We can also add small sealed 16 port ISAMs, suitable for use in remote locations.

To get these benefits while ensuring minimal customer disruption, we need your help. As part of our regression testing, we'd like to test your VDSL / ADSL capable modems with the new; software, linecards and small sealed ISAM.

What's the detail?

Our project is still in the early stages and we're still assessing its impact. At a high level, our current plan is:

• Perform regression testing with current services and modems. We’ll need your help by providing us with modems for testing, similar to the VDSL Band upgrade. This is expected to complete in February 2017.

• Perform soak testing in production. Timing is dependent on how regression testing performs, but we'd like to start as early as possible. We welcome feedback on candidate copper ISAMs.

• Commence rollout to all ~7,500 ISAMs following successful soak testing.

Each software upgrade will have a ~10 minute outage, as the ISAM is rebooted following an upgrade. This outage affects all broadband or baseband IP customers on the ISAM (up to 384 customers), as well as any business services, such as HSNS Lite.

Your Service Delivery Manager will be in touch to confirm what test modems we already have, and if you'd like to add other modems for us to test. We'll share test results for your specific modem(s).

Who do I contact?

A Change Description will provide details of the software upgrade and planned timings. This will be published in November and will be available via the Product Forum, your Account and Service Delivery Managers.

Please contact your Account or Service Delivery Manager with any queries or feedback.