Cable & Wireless Monitors 1,200 Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) Devices with WhatsUp Gold

Company required a preventative tool with monitoring capabilities that would allow them to observe the ‘health’ of networking equipment

Cable & Wireless Panamá is a Panamanian company partially owned by the Government of the Republic of Panama and which owns a Trust, whose beneficiaries are its workers.

The company is present in every region of the country, offering public telephone services as well as fixed and mobile phone service to families, individuals and corporations. It offers broadband internet, pay television, and data hosting and transfer. It is also an innovator, providing modern telecommunications applications to improve public services in the area of healthcare, medical emergencies, education, citizen security, and public and private administration.

Cable & Wireless Panamá is a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) with main offices in London, England and Miami, Florida, in the United States.

Preventive efforts and healthy equipment

As a connectivity service provider to large firms, Cable & Wireless has a network that covers the entire territory of Panama. In order to monitor its clients’ IT equipment and add value to its service offering, the company evaluated the reliability of solutions that it intended to incorporate. “We were not getting reports on connectivity issues until some kind of problem took place. We wanted a preventative tool with monitoring capabilities that would allow us to observe the ‘health’ of our equipment,” stated Mr. Víctor Ramos, Systems Administrator at the Service Operations Center.

1200 CPEs monitored by WhatsUP Gold MSP Edition

“We had previous experience with WhatsUp Gold. After consulting with Ipswitch, we chose the Network version of & Server Monitoring – MSP Edition, because it matched our needs very well. We created a ten-person group dedicated to monitoring and detecting adverse events of the type that occur in the network equipment of each client. At any rate, the functionality of WhatsUp Gold is available to all the support engineers in our department,” added Ramos.

The adaptation process was brief. With the support of Ipswitch team, we were able to start testing with a subset of our clients within only two weeks. “The tool is user-friendly, easy to use, and intuitive, and features simple and customized setup. This made the process much easier. The WhatsConfigured module gives us access to the equipment and facilitates configuration management,” Ramos pointed out.

More satisfied clients

Proactive monitoring provides a lot of value to the clients of Cable & Wireless Panamá. The technical team at Cable & Wireless Panamá currently has its own structure that notifies clients when an anomaly occurs, thus saving a significant amount of time.

These results have now spread to other areas in Cable & Wireless’ Service Operating Center. The Router Support team benefited from the ability of WhatsUp Gold to centralize the management of the clients’ configurations and CPE changes.

In addition, the support engineers have another tool for providing technical support to client links. Thanks to WhatsUp Gold, specific indicators and values can be evaluated in order to speed up the support process. “Because of the good results achieved, we are about to implement remote servers with clients that have entrusted us with the monitoring of the equipment on their local networks. We are expanding our reach,” concluded Víctor Ramos.