UK ISP TalkTalk Hails Project Genesis and “Self-Healing Broadband”

Budget Internet provider TalkTalk has praised the success of their “ground-breaking” Project Genesis system (not to be confused with the world-colonising ‘Genesis Device’ from StarTrek 2), which helps to tackle broadband and phone connection faults by carrying out thousands of line checks every day and automatically raising fault tickets if it finds a problem. Sadly it cannot currently resurrect Vulcan science officers.

The new service, which recently won the Best Network Operation Initiative gong at the World Communications Awards, has so far tested around 2.1 million of TalkTalk’s broadband and phone line connections. At present this includes 99% of new lines and it then continues to check the line after the service has gone live. Overall the system was able to detect 81% of faults automatically, with the remainder being reported by customers.

According to TalkTalk, Project Genesis has already discovered and automatically reported 70,000 migration faults affecting new customers. The system also claims to have reduced the length of time to repair faults on new connections from an average of 4-5 days to 1-2 days. Project Genesis is now being rolled out to cover the ISPs entire customer base of 4.22 million subscribers.

Gary Steen, TalkTalk’s CTO, said:

“Project Genesis means we can diagnose problems quickly and proactively, and deliver a faster resolution for any problems that occur. The aim is to create self-healing broadband, which fixes itself before the customer notices there is a problem. I’m hugely proud of the whole team involved in the design, build and operation of Genesis, it’s truly transformational.”

In fairness, TalkTalk aren’t the only ISP able to conduct automated line checks, so it would be useful to know precisely what kind of tests Project Genesis conducts and how it goes about doing that. Never the less this looks like a useful system and one that other providers might do well to mirror.