What to Look for in an ACS?

The first factor to look for is scalability. A TR-069 system is really based on two components: the ACS and the CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP). The CWMP interacts with the devices while the ACS interacts northbound with your integration points, as well as managing the configuration profiles of devices. To maximize scalability, a solution should separate this functionality into two distinguishable components. This allows the solution to scale to larger deployment much more easily than a single, uniform option and gives your network room to grow.

The second factor to consider is whether the solution is vendor agnostic. Not all devices are created equal and you will most likely have more than one vendor on your network. For this, you will want to have an ACS that is able to support a wide range of TR-069 devices. A vendor-agnostic solution will also address the issue resulting from different vendor interpretations of the TR-069 standard, allowing you to reliably provision and deploy devices to your customers. A single ACS should do the job and you should not need to implement the vendor’s ACS at all.

The third and final factor is the need for support modules for additional devices. For example, our ACS can learn about your devices and build models for them in the system. This means that you don’t need to call us every time you add a new device. You can purchase devices from any vendor with the confidence that the device can be synthesized from its ACS interaction. So forget about adding device modules that you have to pay for all the time. TR-069 should simplify your life, not complicate it.