Running a broadband network without digital twins is like managing an airport without radar. To know where each plane is, you’d have to radio every pilot one by one: Where are you? What’s your altitude? How much fuel do you have left?
It’s slow, error-prone, and dangerous. The bigger the airspace, the harder it gets — and eventually, it becomes unmanageable.
Traditional ACS solutions work in much the same way. They rely on periodic polling and ad-hoc queries to understand the state of millions of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) devices — routers, modems, set-top boxes — spread across the network. Engineers end up chasing device status updates, piecing together incomplete snapshots, and reacting after problems have already hit subscribers.
With digital twins, it’s like switching on the radar. You automatically receive the device’s state updates. Instead of constantly asking, operators can simply look at the “screen” — a live, synchronized model of their entire device fleet. This makes managing the network safer, faster, and infinitely more scalable.
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical CPE device that continuously mirrors its state, configuration, and behavior inside the management platform.
For CPEs, this means every router or modem has a synchronized counterpart in the ACS or USP Controller. The twin holds live information about:
Unlike a static snapshot, a digital twin is dynamic, always updating as the device changes.
It’s not obvious that a CPE management platform automatically provides digital twins. Some legacy solutions operate solely on TR-069 (CWMP), which was never designed with this concept in mind. In TR-069, communication is session-based: the device periodically “calls home” with an update. Between those sessions, the ACS has no live visibility of the device’s state. At best, operators receive a series of snapshots — like asking a pilot for their position over the radio every few minutes.
By contrast, TR-369 (USP) was built from the ground up to support digital twins. It maintains a persistent, event-driven channel using modern transports such as WebSockets, MQTT, or STOMP. Devices update the management system continuously and automatically, just like the radar’s screen is continuously updated. This makes the digital twin truly “alive” — a real-time reflection of the device’s configuration, performance, and telemetry.
So does that mean TR-069 can’t support digital twins? Not exactly. With a sophisticated ACS, TR-069 can approximate the twin by caching the last-known state of a device and syncing changes at the next session. While this isn’t as immediate or granular as USP, it still provides operators with a usable model of the device.
TR-069/CWMP:Operators interact with the twin rather than constantly polling devices, reducing network overhead and simplifying fleet-wide operations. This is the true power behind our Unified Device Management Platform - maximum scalability and minimal resource consumption, supported by TR-369 and digital twin technology.
By analyzing trends in telemetry stored in twins, operators can identify anomalies early and act before outages occur.
Configuration changes or firmware upgrades can be validated on digital twins before being rolled out to live devices.
Customer care agents can view the exact state of a subscriber’s device via the twin, improving first-call resolution and cutting truck rolls.
Changes can be applied to twins even if devices are offline. USP ensures automatic synchronization once the device reconnects.
The USP protocol (TR-369) is the foundation of digital twin functionality:
This is what differentiates AVSystem’s hybrid ACS/USP Controller and CEM from legacy ACS solutions. Where traditional platforms don’t even provide cached device snapshots, AVSystem delivers true digital twins with USP.
Subscriber expectations are higher than ever. Downtime, poor Wi-Fi, or repeated support calls can mean lost customers. At the same time, engineers are under pressure to manage growing fleets of heterogeneous devices without increasing OPEX.
Digital twins provide the solution:
Digital twins transform CPE management from reactive to proactive. By maintaining a synchronized, always-available representation of each device, they enable efficient scaling, predictive maintenance, and better customer experiences.
AVSystem’s hybrid ACS/USP Controller delivers real digital twin functionality using USP (TR-369) and CWMP (TR-069), giving operators true device twins.