"With the Medius in place we are able to focus on the problems that directly impact the customer experience," said John Berglin, headend engineer for GCI. "In the past we might have seen a problem on the network, but we had no way of knowing if it was impacting the customer. Medius can also tell us, for example, that while bits are flowing fine according to the network, packets are actually getting dropped and causing tiling which impacts the customer experience."

When network problems such as video or audio interruptions do occur, Medius gives call centre operators a single interface for consolidated status alerts across GCI's network. This means that as customers call in, operators can see the reason for the call on their screen and simply confirm that the problem is happening and advise customers on repair status.

"Some of the calls we receive are about temporary problems that self-clear, such as an interruption in service from one of our providers. With Medius, the call centre doesn't need to elevate these calls to the service department and can support the customer directly," Berglin explained. "And we also capture trend data so we can easily see where there might be a bigger problem in one area or another."

Based on the success with the Medius deployment at its primary headend, GCI now has plans to deploy Medius and Sentry systems in a number of additional cities including Juneau and Fairbanks.