Background & Challenge

For over a century, La Harpe Telephone Company, headquartered in La Harpe, Kansas, has been serving Allen County and the surrounding rural communities throughout southeastern Kansas. The company provides phone and internet services; with a mix of Fixed Wireless Broadband (FWB) and an expanding Fiber-to-the-Home network, La Harpe continues investing in infrastructure that supports today's demanding streaming and interactive applications.

With a holiday only days away, Network Manager David Lee anticipated a surge in traffic as subscribers tuned in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play live on video streaming services. A poor streaming experience could lead to customer dissatisfaction, angry fans, support-center overload, and reputational damage during a high-profile moment.

In the FWB segment targeted for this project, the ISP serves approximately 1,900 subscribers all supported by a direct internet access (DIA) fiber circuit. Under normal usage, this capacity is sufficient. However, during major live events—particularly NFL games—large numbers of subscribers simultaneously stream HD video. This sudden spike can overwhelm wireless sectors and backhaul links, raising latency, increasing TCP retransmissions, and creating congestion that degrades viewing quality.

To address this urgent need, La Harpe partnered with Bequant and their reseller and networking services partner, TidalWave Wireless, led by consultant Chris Fikert, to rapidly deploy and tune the QoE traffic optimization platform.

‍

Objectives

La Harpe's key goals included:

• Optimize streaming video and gaming performance in preparation for holiday peak usage, ensuring their internet circuit was not over-run.
• Integrate with their Powercode billing system, ensuring subscriber-aware policies aligned with service tiers.
• Improve overall KPI performance, including reducing latency, lowering TCP retransmissions, decreasing congestion, and improving throughput efficiency.
• Gain visibility into per-subscriber performance metrics for proactive troubleshooting.

‍

A One-Week Project

La Harpe had previously deployed the QoE appliance at this network POP, with TCP Optimization (TCPO) and Active Congestion Management (ACM) already enabled but with first-generation flow shaping rules. Working jointly with TidalWave and Bequant, La Harpe implemented the following approach:

1. Data Collection: La Harpe had baseline KPI data, including latency, retransmissions, throughput, and congestion levels.
2. Video Shaping Phase: A new 'golden config' traffic optimization ruleset was applied and evaluated. Several iterations of HD video traffic shaping were tested given a limited internet uplink connection.
3. Game Day: Monitored overall network health and video streaming metrics before, during, and after the game day event.
4. Subscriber Feedback: La Harpe reached out to several subscribers to get feedback on their experience before, during, and after the game. The network got rave reviews.
5. Billing Integration: The Powercode integration was enabled, allowing the BQN to automatically import subscriber information—IP addresses, IDs, and rate plans.
6. Network Expansion: La Harpe now has plans to expand Bequant QoE to their FTTH network and other POPs.

‍

Results

The graph below is the amount of traffic seen on the internet-facing 1Gbps router port over a 3-week period.

The red line is the week before Thanksgiving week.

• There was no explicit video shaping yet in place and no rate plan restrictions from the Powercode integration. The red arrow points to aggregate download traffic capped at the 1Gbps ceiling on Friday at peak time.

The black line is traffic during Thanksgiving week.

• HD video traffic optimization rules were placed within the BQN appliance early in the week to ensure quality experience while not over-stressing the network.
• The light blue rectangle highlights the pre-game and follow-on peak traffic from around 2pm to 8pm. The black arrow points out the substantially more (video & gaming) traffic starting early the next morning and lasting through the evening peak.
• The 1Gbps ceiling was never hit.
• Both Saturday and Sunday were busier than normal all day yet the ceiling was never cramped.

The green line is the week after Thanksgiving week.

• Hourly traffic is back to pre-holiday levels.
• The green arrow is the time when Powercode integration was completed – allowing La Harpe to use the BQN appliance to enforce rate plans and correlate subscribers' KPIs to those plans.
• With holiday traffic behind, again there was no capping out of the 1Gbps internet circuit as traffic patterns returned to normal.

‍

Streaming Optimization Results

Of all TCP throughput improvements, vital streaming applications on the La Harpe network were dramatically enhanced: both Paramount+ and NFL+ carried on Hulu+Live TV, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, and Sling using a single TCPO setting. HD streaming video, in general, was also controlled with a single traffic profile type and applied to all subscribers in the network segment.

‍

Network Visibility & DPI

With per-subscriber network KPI metrics, La Harpe was able to easily identify subscribers with weak KPIs: say, congestion caused by in-home Wi-Fi routers on their FWB segments.

‍

The result: faster issue resolution and more proactive support.

With the BQN platform and Powercode integration now active, La Harpe is equipped with enhanced visibility and a scalable QoE framework that will support both its Fixed Wireless network and its expanding FTTH deployments.

‍

At a Glance

La Harpe Telephone Company, a community-focused ISP serving southeastern Kansas, partnered with Bequant and TidalWave Wireless to prepare its network for one of the year's most demanding streaming events: the Kansas City Chiefs' Thanksgiving game. By deploying Bequant's Quality of Experience (QoE) optimization platform and integrating it with Powercode billing, La Harpe strengthened streaming performance for all subscribers and improved network visibility while not oversaturating an internet connection already near its limit.

"They did it…. The team's quick response to get Powercode integrated and QoE optimized before the Chief's holiday game was nothing short of amazing and put us in great shape. Our customers were happy."

— David Lee, I/OSP Manager, La Harpe Telephone Company

‍

Lessons Learned

• Even with advanced fiber & wireless access technology, end-user QoE depends on holistic network visibility and traffic optimization.
• Integrating billing data with network intelligence creates powerful, subscriber-aware insights.
• Under short notice, tangible network improvements were made with limited resources, helping La Harpe make data-driven decisions about scaling QoE solutions.

Same two small typo fixes as before ("subscribers", "QoE"). Want this as a downloadable file, or ready to move to the next case study?

‍