Have you ever purchased a new electronic device, taken it home, excitedly unwrapped it and switched it on, only to discover that something is wrong and you need to phone customer support?

This scenario is all-too-common in the broadband services industry, and unfortunately, it’s usually the service provider who takes the blame. New customers will often purchase gateways from third parties or redistributors without knowing that the device’s firmware is out of date. When the customer attempts to connect this device to their network, they’re quickly blocked by an error message (or sometimes no message at all) due to expired or unsupported firmware.

This is something you want to avoid regardless of whether it is a new customer’s first impression or an existing customer whose loyalty is important to you.

How can you prevent this situation from occurring?

Ensuring that your firmware solution supports automated on-boot firmware updates is one way to guarantee seamless device startup. By configuring on-boot firmware campaigns, you can ensure any devices appearing that on your network and match the vendor, model, and firmware version within your campaign will be automatically updated to the correct firmware version, before the device is fully provisioned.

This procedure ensures that seamless plug-and-play devices live up to their name. As an added bonus, you save OPEX by reducing manual processes while reducing the risk of subscriber churn due to a negative experience.

Accelerate Device Roll-Out with Mass-Device On-Boot Updates

Another common scenario that service providers deal with is mass-device updates for outdated firmware. When a fleet of devices on an outdated or unsupported firmware version arrive to the operator’s premises, the service provider is often forced to update the firmware versions on every device—a costly and tedious manual process—before they can deploy the devices to the customer premises.

With automatic on-boot updates, operators can avoid spending these unnecessary resources on device realization and firmware updates in-house, and instead deploy those devices and have the firmware versions automatically updated once a connection is made from the subscriber premises.