Communications Technology recognizes Insight for best practices

Yesterday's guest blogger John Dobken is writing again today about an article in Communications Technology magazine.

Communications Technology magazine recognizes Insight Communications in its most recent issue for best practices in the area of technology. Take a look at what they had to say about Insight and our Chief Technology Officer Hamid Heidary.

Insight Communications is no stranger, having taken our Operator of the Year award five years ago (before we shifted the focus toward regions and systems).

Less well-known is the new Insight, the slimmed down MSO that emerged without its Illinois or much of its Indiana markets as a result of the dissolution of its partnership with Comcast; or the Insight where technical leadership now resides with Hamid Heidary, his predecessor, the popular Charlie Dietz, having retired.

Heidary added CTO to his title in April. For the previous two years, he held the title of executive vice president, central operations. His previous career included chief operating office at Iesy Hessen (a German MSO) and CTO of NTL:Europe.

What tripped the wire for us this year was not Heidary's promotion, but rather evidence that he leads a team that very much knows what it is doing.

A year ago, PC World readers ranked Insight Broadband 10.0 ahead of its competitors in terms of overall customer satisfaction and both downstream and upstream speeds. In addition to its 10.0 (10 Mbps) service, the MSO offers a 20 Mbps download service and up to 1.5 Mbps upload.

Insight's prowess in high-speed data is commonly known and attested by savvy users on at BroadbandForum.com, where Insight execs have been known to mix it up. As is clear by talking with Heidary, high-class performance is no accident.

"Two years ago, if you were to have asked what is the speed or experience of customers that get on the Internet to browse or do whatever they do, we hoped it was good, but had no way of knowing," Heidary said.

What it took to gain that kind of granular and widely accessible visibility was the combination of an off-the-shelf measurement tool and a homegrown database presentation interface. Add to that a tenfold expansion of its network operations center (NOC), the codification of hundreds of processes, and the use of PCs programmed to act like subscribers.

That's the kind of operational sophistication that lies behind end-of-year Q4 2007 results that included 26 percent growth in high-speed Internet, 60 percent growth in phone, 18 percent growth in digital and - stranger yet to say - 5 percent growth in basic customers. Results from Q1 2008 were consistent with those numbers. Consider that they were achieved amidst a distracting corporate split, and you have our third example, another top-tier performance in broadband cable engineering and technical operations.

Comments

[Charley]

Micheal is one of the most annoying people I've ever seen.

The best thing he could do for the customer is keep quiet.

He loves to blow his own horn though.

[ARGO]

Michael Willner has good reason to be proud of his Insight.

Let him "toot that horn" because it's 3,000 times better than Comcast's horn.

[Paris]

I can honestly say, I'm proud to be an Insight customer. Insight's not only blown my expectations out of the water, but the service I've experienced from them is second to none. Especially since the rollout of Insight Broadband 20.0.. I signed up immediately after it was available, and I was pleasantly surprised. I've consistently ran at 99 to 125% above my rated line speed. The nearest competitor, Cincinnati Bell only offers at maximum, 3MB down, a far cry from Insight's most basic offering..

Just for giggles and grins, I ran a speed test as I was posting this..

From Judge #1, Knology's speedtest system:

Test Result:
Download Speed: 20472 kbps (2559 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1265 kbps (158.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

From Judge #2, Insight Louisville #1:

Your Download Speed = 24.09Mbps
Your Upload Speed = 1.20Mbps

[John Summers]

I too am proud to be a Insight Customer. The speeds are the best as is the service.